The world is full of things to create web sites. WordPress is probably the most popular but to do anything beyond a dumb blog there is learning to do. And more often than not, it has a feature which gets in your way. Today I have run into SPIP and I am impressed which how much it will do with virtually no learning.
Their site calls it “A system for publishing content on the Internet”. A pretty concise description. Things that it does with pretty close to know thinking is support multi-language content, support for documents, images and more, content organization (sections and sub-sections), forums (related to articles) and even creating a petition from an article.
I confess I am totally new to using it so read the site (English or French) to figure out all it can do but it seems amazingly powerful with virtually no learning curve. Stuff just makes sense. For example, I wanted to figure out how to embed an image and went looking for something complicated. It turns out that when you add an image or document it shows you want you need to enter to include (and position) it. But, it seemed too easy. (For example, to include the first image you add you just enter emb1 in angle brackets with an optional positing parameter.)
If you want something that can put together a functional site in less than an hour, take a look.