[solardev]

Oh wow, when you said old, you really meant it lol. Haven't heard of the Nukes in decades now.

Honestly, I hate to say this, but if you really want that level of server-side all in one power... maybe Drupal IS worth considering after all. Most modern sites aren't built that way anymore, instead opting to compose a site out of many services (eg a CMS for marketing pages, Discourse for a forum, an auth provider linking them all together, etc.)

A monolithic community on a single engine is in fact the kind of (rare) use case that Drupal actually fits... making its complexity possibly worthwhile. It's just overkill for most sites that aren't like that.

WordPress might also be able to get there eventually, with a lot of plug-ins, but at that point it would be so bloated that Drupal might actually be cleaner. Might also be worth checking to see if any of the older PHP CMSes (Joomla, etc.) are still being maintained.

Sorry, I haven't looked at this sort of use in years and wouldn't be able to provide more details than that :/