A CMS (such as Drupal, on which Nodal is built), is a great way for a research group (or anyone else) to whip up a website.
I was investigating a few CMS resources recently and came across a couple of very useful sites. CMS Matrix allows side-by-side comparison of up to 10 CMS tools at once, from an extensive list. OpenSource CMS is a great site - they have set up demo sites where you can try out a wide variety of CMS software.
Comments
Plone on the range
If you're not married to PHP, you may wish to check out Plone. You can set up a trial site for free at ObjectIs. Plone offers WebDAV + FTP access into the database object store, indexing of uploaded documents for searching, and lots of other user goodies. Updating or modifying the underlying python objects is not for the faint of heart, but it's a very modern and standards-compliant system. It's the closest I've seen to a "CMS in a box" in the Open Source realm. I quite like the way uploaded jpgs can automagically become photo album objects.
Aliester