I also concur as to its suitability, and also that it will require a
moderately experienced developer (I know thats a bit subjective)
but I'd say someone with an English graduate degree and a
couple of years experience or an American masters degree and
similar experience.
I've just completed a site with *some* similarities to what your
doing, so that should build confidence.
I think though care should be taken when considering using
many of the packages with OpenACS. The core is *very* good,
templating, request processing, forms-api, and so on. But i
would use careful judgement when using any of the packages in
any other way than their default behaviour. And even then some
are better than others.
If you think you may need to extend or alter an existing package
quite radically I would give serous consideration to developing
your own. Many of the packages are not good examples of how
to do things, they are quite fragile (i.e. they break when altered
significantly) and many of them make fairly poor design
assumptions as to what they might be turned to.
Having said that, many of them are making simple problems
look harder than they really are. The News package for example
has a *lot* of code, for doing really very little. After a few
frustrating days with it, I binned it and started doing my own thing
from scratch (I needed changes to the News behaviour). It took
me less than five hours to write a complete replacement!.
