Ontopic: OP, you should really be looking at CMSes (as Antheus mentioned) instead of languages.

Ditto. Just about any hosting provider these days provide a number of CMS's that can do this out of the box and also provide forum solutions like phpBB that can easily be setup by just point and clicking these days!
Also, keep in mind that you'll usually get charged a premium for Python, Java, Ruby language support.
PHP is dirt cheap that's probably one of the main reasons why it's still widely used although it is a horrible abomination of a language

I started web developing with PHP and hated it, I always thought it was just me not 'getting' the language or something as it is really popular and it was my first language I ever learnt. Anyway eventually I moved onto ASP.NET which was even worse, web development was painfully dull, slow and boring until I gave ASP.NET MVC a go, which is fast and far more easier to work with than PHP / ASP.NET (well for me at least anyway), it has been designed really well, I really like the razor engine and MVC design.

I take it when you say ASP.NET, you really mean Webforms.

Yes

I take it when you say ASP.NET, you really mean Webforms.

I maintain that there is no such thing as Webforms. Microsoft never came up with the idea and they don't exist and the world is a better place because of it.

Also, there were only three Star Wars movies.

It will be more important that you know what is web application and how it works than you choose a language

Couldn't agree more with ya Antheus, about all languages, including Java. But I have to say that there's still quite a few Java shops out there in the enterprise world; I see job postings for them fairly regularly. Also Java has made comeback recently in the mobile world for developing for Android OS.

Still, in mid-large enterprises, I think that ASP.NET with a good CMS system (Sitecore) can't be beat. I work in one of these shops, and we run an agile process where we optimize our productivity with assembly-line-like continuous deployment processes and use TFS to produce metrics that measure productivity, quality, find bottlenecks in the process, etc. But it's a lot of work and $$$ to setup something like this, and it's just not worth it for small organizations.

For individuals or small companies, php/wordpress is your best bet for a cheap CMS. With a php/wordpress site you can still get data, but if you're doing lots of databinding an MVC framework is better. For MVC frameworks, ASP.NET MVC is great for data driven sites using LINQ to SQL. Ruby on Rails is another MVC framework, but IMO the syntax is pretty ugly and I've seen a few examples where it took overly much code to do something simple. I haven't used Django yet but I've heard good things about it. I think it's technically not an MVC framework, but it's something very similar.

Drupal! The white house's choice. Actually I'm not sure if that gets any points...

All this theoretical discussion is interesting, but the OP is looking for a slideshow, calendar and spreadsheet.

That sounds like a great application for wordpress integrated with the free Google Apps package - no need to overcomplicate the matter, and even a non-tech can set that combo up in a couple of hours.

<offtopic>
[indent=1][quote name='szecs' timestamp='1332348439' post='4923991']
Leonardo was a genius at mechanisms, but was he an expert in other fields essential to actually build something? I guess not, many of his inventions wouldn't have worked with materials available at that age. Some of them wouldn't work with today's materials maybe.

[indent=1]There is an event that occurred during the enlightenment, which I like to nickname the 'knowledge singularity'.

[indent=1]It's the point where the sciences start to diverge, and become distinct disciplines from Philosophy. In effect, up to that point the quote-unquote "philosophers" had necessarily been experts in many, many diverse topics, but with the explosion of scientific knowledge it ceased to be feasible for one person to master so much knowledge. Leonardo Da Vinci is a good example of the earlier jack-of-all-trades approach, and from what I understand he did have a fair background in engineering, etc. in addition to art. For artists in the present age, to follow in his footsteps is not at all trivial.
</offtopic>

In reference to Antheus' giant list of software stacks, you seem to have left out the Java stack. In many ways it has similar pros/cons to the .NET ecosystem, although my impression is that both developers and hosting providers are easier to come by for Java.
[/quote]

Many of Leonardo's inventions worked and were perfectly viable. I've seen the special exhibit they did about them with working demonstrations and I've tested some myself.