DotNetNuke is a software package basically. It sits on your server and allows you to build a website, such as this one with a variety of different content. There's no programming involved, although an ASP.NET programmer could certainly build customized modules. There are a slew of websites that offer different modules, both free and paid for. If people are interested, I would be more than happy to do a DotNetNuke demo at a future meeting. It is free to use. I found it cumbersome to install manually, but there are several hosting services that will take care of the installation.

As far as the tickets, that could be done. For example, with the events calendar you can add events, and allow people to register for those events. Our events are free so there's no fee to register, however you can require payment via PayPal, in which case the user will be taken to paypal.com to complete the payment before they are registered for the event. There are also ecommerce modules available, both free and paid ones. With those products can easily be added and sold right on the website.

The membership on the site is set up with security roles. If someone registers on the site they are considered a "registered user", however once you pay your membership fee yur status automatically changes to "member". It is very easy to set permissions throughout the site to allow certain users to see certain things depending on their security role. For example, someone who is not registered would not be able to post on this forum, and only have permission to view.

It is a very powerful tool, and very userfriendly since it has the feel of a Microsoft application that most people are familiar with. There are other ones out there too. I know Marc uses Joomla, and can probably give you some feedback on that as well.