The document structure your friend is interested in is something aD's working towards, which means we'll port it to OpenACS (it's up in its beginning form in ACS Classic 3.3 but we're going to wait until 4.0 to port it).
In today's OpenACS you need to hack the scripts by hand, and there's not a content management module ala Vignette (because ACS Classic doesn't include one). The folks at Ybos wrote one that works OK for ACS Classic (you can see it at http://naturewell.com though the newsfeed for stories isn't up and running yet, or at least wasn't about 36 hours ago), you could kindly request ybos get off their butts and port it to OpenACS (or not so kindly, I don't care :)
Now, in reality, the simple thing your friend wants to do could probably be solved by an few evening's hacking on the News module, which does exist in OpenACS, if your description accurately describes what he wants...
