Is WordPress good for this? [closed]
Wordpress is mainly a blogging platform and it is an excellent product in this regard. There are numerous plugins to extend the platform and integrate additional features. However the further you extend WP, the more maintenance that is required to keep the features inter-operating. I could not recommend WP for your above stated needs.
I would recommend a more comprehensive CMS product that incorporates your requirements, out of the box, rather than continually extending a limited-target base product. Drupal is my personal choice for a "full-featured" CMS. As with WP, Drupal also has a very active dev community and the product can easily be extended to meet new requirments.
You should spend some time at the Open Source CMS site test driving some of the platforms that are available.
Drupal you can try !
You might want to take a look at Wordpress Multi-user and/or BuddyPress. Both of these are plugins for Wordpress which gives you the user profile, internal messaging, etc which you are looking for. I personally would stick with some type of premade solution rather than writing this whole thing from scratch. Too many areas to introduce bugs to where as a premade solution has already gotten you to that last 80% mark of development.
Good luck and hope this helps you in your project.
WordPress will handle this so just go ahead.
- News: WordPress has the concept of Pages and Posts built in. You can also create custom taxonomy if that is required, either by using the new taxonomy features in WP 3 or use the Pods plugin
- Forum: Check out bbPress
- User Profiles: WordPress has a simple role system built in and this might be good enough for you. You can easily configure it in such a way that user needs to register before commenting.
- Check out the User Messenging plugin http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/user-messages/
Note that you can scale up to BuddyPress if you need more functionality.
Drupal is without doubt a much more robust tool, but the learning curve is steeper than WordPress so at least give WP a try before scaling up. I think it easily can do what you want here and it shouldn't take more than a couple of hours for a person experienced with WordPress to set a demo site up.