Our campus uses DotNetNuke as the backend for its website. Opinions aside
about the wisdom of that particular CMS choice, one DNN module that has
proven to be extremely useful at MPOW is the DotNetNuke Announcements
module.

  http://dnnannouncements.codeplex.com/documentation

We are currently using it for all of our announcements, but I find I keep
looking for an alternative that I might use as a replacement. I'm worried
about what I would do if the campus ever were to switch away from DNN.

Here are several essential functionality requirements that I am looking for
in a replacement.

Publication and Expiration Dates -- Posts in DNN Announcements have both
publication and expiration date and time fields. This means you can write
an announcement in advance and it won't appear in public current events
listing until the specified date and time. If the optional expiration date
and time is set, the post will drop out of the current list of events once
that date is passed, but will continue to appear in the Monthly and
Category archives. The RSS feed for the current events listing therefore
only includes items that have not expired. This functionaliity, especially
the expiration feature, is not found in the same form in any of the common
blogging platforms I've looked at. In WordPress, the CMS I'm most familiar
with, I've found plugins that "expire" a post by assigning it to a
different category or deleting it. However, neither of those approaches are
satisfactory. Are there any CMSes or blogging platforms that have true
expiration date functionality, either natively or via plugins?

Featured Posts -- Posts can be easily tagged to be "featured" which means
they float to the top, regardless of default sort order (DNN Announcements
lets you choose to sort lists of posts by either publication or expiration
date). I believe there are ways to pull the featured post content to
display on other pages, although that is something I have not explored. I
think there are ways to achieve this in WordPress using plugins.

Publication and Expiration Date functionality is the biggie. Most of the
other key functionality in DNN Announcements can be found in other systems
-- i.e., use of author, title, summary, hierarchical categories, tags,
thumbnail image, summary image, and other similar metadata fields -- so I'm
less worried about being able to replicate that functionality in a
replacement system.

I would not rule out calendar systems per se, but what separates that use
case from the announcements use case is that most of my announcements are
either not tied to a particular date and time (i.e., announcements about a
new service) or span a block of time (i.e., a show in the art gallery).
Calendar systems don't really handle those sorts of announcements well or
at all.

Any suggestions? I'm looking for either a standalone announcements system
or a module in a more general CMS. It would be nice if it installed on a
vanilla LAMP stack.

Thanks,
Tom