As a school webmaster with a limited no budget, I sometimes have to be creative when building my school site. I purposely look for FOSS projects when thinking of my site. I've used Joomla! to build the site, supplemented it with VTCalendar, and even used MagpieRSS to help me include headlines from the sports scheduling service that my athletic director uses.

Using Magpie took a steep learning curve, and I would be hesitant to recommend it to anyone who didn't have a pretty good understanding of HTML and  PHP. But, enter Google... Google has done more for the Internet than Al Gore could ever claim.

The Google AJAX Feed API makes RSS feeds pretty simple. I used this API and in only a few minutes I was able to help out a "non-techie" school webmaster put her calendar headlines (using an RSS feed, of course) onto the front page of her site. It really was as easy as copying and pasting a little code into the head section of her page and then adding additional code into the body of the page where she wanted this little box to go. It took us only a few minutes to get this done, and her Principal is THRILLED.

The site above gives a "hello world" example that is a matter of copy and paste into a text editor and upload for testing. Full documentation is also given in their developer guide. You can even style the look and feel of the gadget to match your site. In a word... wow.