CMS with user authentication?

[Anon]

I'm wondering if anyone out there has found a reliable, easy to install and update/maintain CMS script which handles user authentication. Here's my issue:

After looking at several packages (PHP Nuke, PHPWebsite, FireSite, etc.) I keep finding that they either do the management part of the site as news articles or they have no user management at all.

All I need is the ability to put content into a system, restrict it on a user by user basis, and serve up simple pages and file attachments provided by authors. This doesn't seem like it would be hard but I can't find anything that seems to fit the bill. Any suggestions?

Many thanks.

[Anon]

You'll probably have to write your own; most packages like PHPNuke are overkill for your application and if you try to recycle the code you'll go blind (poor coding practices, very bad data modeling).

One of my staff, a competent Perl coder, learned PHP and wrote a content-management system similar to what you describe in two or three days. I believe he's actually using HTTP BASIC authentication on Apache, but using PHP to manage the process of creating users.

The CMS he created allows our news service and our 30 or so newspapers to exchange news articles, graphics, Quark files, et cetera. It isn't a workflow system but rather a content-sharing repository and is fairly simple in terms of design.