I wanted a way for my Fledging Unix Programmers students to be able to be able share their solutions to problems. I also wanted to collect links, comments, and questions from students and web surfers who were outside of class.
I thought quite a bit about working with an ACS. After much pain and suffering, I installed Oracle and the ACS, but it was a bit overkill,the licensing was grey at best, and I wasn't about to learn all of their table layouts. It just seemed like too much.
So I started, and finished within a day, a small set of python scripts that would allow my students to do all those things. (Who knows how long it would have taken had I tried to tackle the ACS system...)
I will confidently say that if this system is what you want, that the Python scripts alone will be just fine. There is no need for an RDBMS and all the things that come from it when it's just a few students, and the occasional page hit from outside. Python shelves do just fine for persistance.
However, I also wanted to learn how to use PostGreSQL. It's a default install with RedHat 7.0, and remarkably easy to set up. After I had my pages made, I focused on making them use PostGreSQL. Hey! It was actually easy!
So, my current work is on the PostGreSQL using Python scripts.
You can see the result by visiting the Fledging Unix Programmers' Annotatable Problem Sets