You could use one of those vBulletin portal plugins, so there is a forum that only staff members can make new posts in, but others can reply to existing posts, and the front page script just scrapes that forum for posts.
That would save you the trouble of writing a news posting system again, and give staff members a familiar interface for news posting.
To be fair, it would probably take less time to throw up a basic news posting system than to work out how the portal plugin is supposed to work.
Mentioning vBulletin brings up probably the biggest architectural problem, though: it stores sessions in a bizarre way (which I could never quite work out), and that makes the prospect of trying to integrate comments with everything else unnecessarily complex unless the whole site basically
is a vBulletin hack, the idea of which doesn't exactly inspire me much, to be honest.
Matt, you under estimate how much James loves writing news posting systems from scratch. Or any other sort of website back-end.
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Define "from scratch." I already mentioned frameworks in the first post. A simple news system like that would probably take 10-15 minutes provided I didn't worry too much about how it looked. (HTML/CSS is what takes all the time nowadays, and there's really no way to escape it...)
