Suggested approach to replicate an existing news app

We have an application in Confluence that was created for us by a 3rd party developer to store news and events (links to articles). We'd like to replace this with some combination of built-in Confluence, Theme Builder, and perhaps Bubbles.

I was looking at the Blog for the Community Bubbles Plugin and this very closely resembles, from a functional perspective, what each "channel" looks like. How is this page being created? Is this something in Bubbles, or is this just a blog done with Theme Builder and Confluence?

The application does this:

• Home page is a table of contents, with links to the various topics we use to track news. Some topics have a hierarchy (for example, Desktop OS has entries for several flavours of Windows and Mac systems).
• Each topic has a place at the top describing what kind of content to expect in that area, followed by a scrolling list of recent entries. You can click a link for an RSS feed, or else "watch" the page for nightly batch email. You can use a calendar control to pick a date and see the content entered on that date.
• Individual entries are currently stored as blog entries, thus searchable by date.

There's more to it of course, but that's the high-level gist of what we're doing. Here's the question - what tool (or tools) do you suggest we use to replicate this sort of functionality? Is this a Forum (Bubbles), or a Blog (Theme Builder), or some combination? I would guess this type of thing isn't particularly unusual, do you have links to show what other people have done (and better yet sample code to beg/borrow/steal to "emulate" those pages)?