Hiya Google Gurus! I am in the early stages of building a website that
needs to do some pretty spectacular things. What I think is needed is
a Content Management System (CMS), but am open to alternatives.
I'm building a community website that gives it's users their own
applications, such as blog, news, image gallery, messaging, etc. There
are many sites out there that do this, such as Friendster,MySpace, and
LiveJournal. I'd like something *similar* to a SOAP web service model,
where style is completely seperated from functionality. With SOAP
services there is a generic API provided  by a service, and it's up to
a client application to handle user presentation, which is
conceptually what I'd like. Ideally the interaction between server and
client could be HTTP GET/POST requests and the response would be an
XML document.
An image gallery application, say 'gallery.cgi' would take a query
like '/gallery.cgi?page=1' and return something like:

<XML ...>
<gallery>
<image ID=1 url="hawaii.jpg"/>
<image ID=2 url="rome.jpg"/>
...
</gallery>
</xml>

Don't worry about how the client works, it can adapt as long as the
XML is well formed. So the idea is to be able to have a bunch of these
applications (blog,gallery,etc) that each have their own API's that I
can write clients for. I figure I'll leave the description as is and
just include what I feel is necessary in this CMS that I'm looking
for.

Necessary Features:
- Global authentication - Basically a single sign-on approach to all apps.
- Uses HTTP GET/POST Outputs XML (Sure, XML templates are fine)
- Runs on Apache

Preferable Features:
- Open source following - Developers designing field-tested "plug-in" apps.
- Perl based.

The closest I've seen to what I want is "Zope" (zope.org). I'm still
exploring Zope as an option, but don't know much about it.

Ok, I'll leave it at this for now. Let me know if I can clarify
anything here. Thanks!