I would like to publish dynamic online calendars and staff biographies for a non-profit and would like to know of an open-source program or scripting language I can use. What I have in mind is maintaining this information in text files or spreadsheets or databases on the server I could update and, the server would then automatically generate the updates into HTML pages on-the-fly. If my organization's host includes PHP, would that be the way to go? I'm looking for an open-source solution so this can be done at no cost to my non-profit client. Am I barking up the right tree? Any other suggestions? Thank you!

Not sure I completely follow your end goal. However, to allow people to dynamically update their own pages, we have been working on Joomla. They create their own page, their own bio, update their own material and publish it all themselves. The groups system really helps to control who can create/approve what content, and very little of the frontend is hands on from the IT perspective. The really nice addition is that it includes a couple of wysiwyg editors so nearly anybody with a connection and account can make a somewhat decent page.

The other benefit here is that you can connect the database info to something simple for you to maintain. Accessing the "users" section for example from your input app allows you to easily input and update simple info (name, position, phone, location) and making small simple changes to the code to call the entry in the database would allow you to have easy updateability as well.

-Chad