All:

First is zope a good idea to use for this and if so how should I proceed. What I'm looking to do is make a dynamic site that allows personnel to create news items, web pages, events, and such that will automatically show on the site based on certain criteria. The criteria being a start and end date, priority of 1-5, 1 being must be seen first, 5 being show last. I've be doing this with PHP, however we'd like to move to zope as we feel this is a better option. If zope is a go how or would we be a good starting point. Any suggestions would be great.

this is where zope excels, imho. you can get the news done using dtml documents only, or use zclass, or make your own zope product. squishdot may be used to publish news. even cmf if you're brave (:)) there are available products to help you manage events. hth