I know you guys hate windows but, using ASP or ASP.NET is not expensive at all. Anyone can code in either for free. The .NET framework is free, and Microsoft offers Visual Web Developer Express as well as SQL Server Express 2005 which are both available for free as well. They offer nearly all the features of their pricier sister products. SQL Server Express is exactly the same as the full version, except that datbases are limited to 4gb. That’s what I use, and I host on Windows VPS servers at GoDaddy for $30 a month.

DotNetNuke is also an EXCELLENT free ASP.NET content management system! It’s very very good and has many great modules that come with it.

Brent — Hrm. Have to take your word for it I guess. I had a rotten experience trying to get DotNetNuke to work for one of my past clients. They were having issues with it before they brought me on to work with it, and ultimately we had so many issues getting it to cooperate with the other software we needed to install that we ended up giving up on it and I had to convert everything over to a different CMS. It was quite the pain in the rump.

True enough cshel (added your blog to my G-Reader). DNN is one of those things you have to go all or nothing with. You can’t deploy another ASP.NET web app of your own under the same domain as far as I know. Intead you’d have to use a subdomain, or iframe or some hacky thing like that. If you do want to do your own stuff with DNN, you pretty much have to write a DNN module using DNN specifications. But for people new to the web, it has pretty much everything they’d ever need IMO.