Hi, y'all. I'm the communications director/newspaper editor for a diocese in the Great Lakes area. Currently we have a proprietary solution that strikes me (and I don't want to go into detail) as both expensive and limited. (Not a good combination!) I have some other issues with it too.

I'm an open source fan personally (Linux at home now for the past several months after a[nother] Vista crash gave me that finally push), I know Wordpress CMS pretty well (on wp.com hosted sites), I've played a bit with Joomla and know next to nothing about Drupal except that it seems to be spoken of highly these days. I might be able to configure and administer Joomla for our needs but I almost certainly lack the time (and perhaps the technical knowlege) to do templates. I gather - although this may have changed - that Drupal is more technical still.

Basically I think we'd be looking for a new hosting solution and a new content management system, which I'm assuming would also necessitate a new design, since I doubt the proprietary system's templates are going to magically transfer somehow. There is also the matter of whether we can transfer the old site or have to rebuild it from scratch or lose some of it.

So I'm looking for some advice. I may have lots of followup questions too :).

1) Of the available CMS choices I listed, which do you recommend and why?

2) What would you recommend on hosting, and why? (And what do you think is a reasonable rate for hosting and maintaining the site with available tech support in case we get hacked, etc.? When I look at big-name corporate providers I'm seeing rates way, way lower than what we're currently paying.)

3) I'm sure there are specialists (perhaps even here) who can design templates for those systems. What would a typical cost for a project like that be?

4) Are there possibilities for transferring the existing stuff from the site besides grabbing the data currently there and redoing all the pages individually.

5) How likely is it that all this is going to require another staff person with more technical know-how than I have?

I have other questions, but I don't want to overwhelm. Thanks in advance for any input.