Using wordpress as a portal

Hi,

I want to build a portal-like site about music events and I wonder if I could use WordPress for this task (cause I like how the admin panel works many many times more than drupal’s/jooma’s). So I’d to ask you, experienced users, if it’s possible with small to moderate amount of programming work or should I look for another solution. My questions are:

1) Would it be possible to create such system using existing plugins?
2) If yes, could you advise which plugins would be useful? There are thousands of them and I’m a little bit overwhelmed ??

The site would consists of pages about cities and music bands. Each city would have a ‘main’ page (post) with an article about it and feeds with events (posts) in this city. The same with music bands. There will be some posts (like “Metallica will play in NY”) which I’d like to be able to connect by tag or even better by some kind of drop-down list to a particular city (NY) and band (Metallica). Some posts will be only about a city or band. I’d also like to use traditional tags (‘Metallica Tour 2010’, ‘East coast events’).

So basically I’d like to add two dropdowns (or better something what whould let me deal with a large numer of cities) to a post edit page in the admin and create custom feeds on the frontend. I’d also like to add google maps for editing city’s main page by writing a custom plugin.

Thank you very much for any help, I have a little time to choose the platform and I’d love to give WP a chance.
– ian