To be honest, I can offer no advice about the best web publishing platform.I installed Coppermine for us to use but that was a bit of a disaster area, trying to get it to do everything we wanted. The usability was terrible. The support was terrible and my expectations in those regards weren't unreasonable.To be honest, I couldn't find anything serious to replace it either.What you want is a full-blown CMS that handles articles fully and handles images fully.Planetdescent.net has a great setup. It's basically a forum, extended with a CMS add-on.I don't think that's the approach you might want to take because this forum works great in fairness if only we could give it a new skin.I think you want a single, pre-build CMS. IntoCerberon
http://chmodoplusr.com/IntoCerberon uses PHP Nuke and that seemed to work well for them but that site is old. I'm sure you could find a more modern equivalent.That being the case - we could throw the content of the X-Archive Coppermine into there and have a fresh start because I'm not happy about where I can take the X-Archive from here.It's hard to skin and it has few open avenues in terms of expanding it or improving its integration into the site.Very tricky.
Dream big and bold and daring.