Michael,
It so happens that everybody doing common 'web development' do the same activities as you describe. And yes, AOLserver+OpenACS _will_ make your life easier.
* To develop with OpenACS and AOLserver, you will need to learn Tcl.
* OpenACS builds on top of AOLserver, and adds many APIs to make your life easier.
OpenACS has APIs for the following (and much more):
* Authenticate the user (permissions system)
* Display dynamic pages with data coming out of a database (database API and templating system)
* Create, display and process forms (templating system, ad_page_contract)
* allow user to cause programs/scripts to be run to affect data in the database (see the AOLserver ns_register_* Tcl functions, and the OpenACS cron package)
All the information above, including information on developing with AOLserver is available at https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-4/acs-dev.html
OpenACS has support for sessions https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-4/request-processor.html
When we talk about "online communities" we are usually referring to a "community" of user in a web environment. Unless you're going to be the _only_ person using your website (which doesn't seem to be the case, since you talk about users in the plural) then you'll have an online community where users will be viewing, adding and editing content to your site.
An example would be amazon.com. It's a community of shoppers. In the bookstore side, users can view books, post comments, see reviews by other users, see what other users have reviewed, enter their wishlists and see other users' wishlists, etc, etc. That's a community. That's the kind of thing OpenACS was written to facilitate.
A lot of the OpenACS community started in the ACS 2 and 3, days, usually after reading "Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing". OpenACS 4 evolved from that toolkit to become what it is today.
You are welcome to post comments to our documentation (https://openacs.org/doc/openacs-4/) and tell us where you think we can improve. We are working on a "newbie" guide to OpenACS.
