Neighborhood "portal" or tiny ISP-type web app

[Charles Steinkuehler]

I am interested in setting up a small website for my neighborhood 
(Potwin Place, a late 1800's Victorian neighborhood in Topeka).

In addition to some static content (history, house pictures, etc.), I'd 
really like to be able to support a few "advanced" features:

- User accounts:  This would only be for neighborhood residents...manual 
account creation is OK, but it would be nice if users could reset 
passwords and such themselves.

- Authorized downloads:  I maintain the directory, and would like to put 
PDF's online for download, but they should not be publically accessible.

- Runs on "typical" web-server:  I can setup pretty much anything on my 
own servers, but if for some reason I leave the neighborhood, I'd like 
something that would be pretty easy to setup on a typical web-hosting 
account.

Bonus features:
- E-mail forwarding:  I'd like to let folks be able to create 
user at potwin.org e-mail accounts.  All mail to one of these accounts 
would be forwarded to a "real" e-mail account (ie: I don't need web 
based e-mail access or anything, just the ability to manage a forwarding 
address).

- User can modify their own contact information (phone # & e-mail 
addresses).  Did I mention I maintin the neighborhood directory? :)

I know I'll probabaly have to code some stuff myself to get exactly the 
features I want, but I'd really like to leverage an existing web 
application (especially for the user accounts & authentication stuff), 
and I figure there have to be tons of this sort of thing out there already.

Any suggestions for something that might work well for this kind of 
application?

I'd probably prefer an apache/php/mysql type of solution since that's 
what I'm most familiar with (and unlike perl, php doesn't look like 
jibberish to me), but am open to anything, even if it means buying some 
new O'Reilly books on perl. :)

-- 
Charles Steinkuehler
charles at steinkuehler.net