Installing Drupal

I'm considering using drupal for an extranet site. Broadly, content falls into three categories:

public -- this information can be viewed by anyone (anonymous users).
shared -- this information is available to employees and privileged external users.
private -- this information is only available to people in the employee role.

Can I use the 'user roles' stuff to hide/show/make read-only content on a node-by-node basis? For example, a public user shouldn't be able to see any pages marked as private.

I'm not sure if this has been discussed before, but I'm unable to find much using search. Effectively, how does the filter system work?

From what I gather, the _filter hook is an on-the-fly filter. Good for little things, but for anything complex this would eat up CPU.

The _nodeapi hook seems to be able to do on-submit filtering, or at least that's what seems to have been suggested. My question is, how does this work? When I use the textile filter, which uses this method, I can edit the filtered pages and find they are still in textile format.

We are still in the stage of selection of opens ource CMS. We would need the website developed/configured/tested using Drupal 4.3 by developers in another country (Russia) and, once completed, ported to US co-location. (It is not an option for developers to work remotely with Drupal instance hosted in US).

Would greatly appreciate if somebody can explain portability issues for a website powered with Drupal 4.3 with hacked themes, customized modules and loaded with content - this issue is critical in our selection of CMS.

I have added the mailhadler module and run the mysql setup script. i can see it in the administer=>configuration=>module section and check it to activate and save it but i can't find it's control panel to configure it. it does not show up with the rest of the modules and i get no error. is there something i am missing?? also it does not apear to have a name displayed in the administer=>configuration=>module section but has a check box, is that normal??

when I submit contents it show

user error: Access denied for user: '21view_com@localhost' to database '5icn'
query: LOCK TABLES sequences WRITE in /iSERVER/robustCGI/www.myblog/includes/database.mysql.inc on line 90.

Hi, on another post, I mentioned that I thought Drupal was still "beta-ish" and you asked for clarification:

Firs, let me say this was NOT meant as a slam - I really like Drupal. The beta-ish quality has to do with the many many ups and downs I experienced implementing it on my site. As someone trying to use it in an enterprise setting where if something doesn't work, it HAS to be fixed, or people get really mad, I need to be sure I am using software that is going to work. So I have restricted what I use of Drupal to things I have tested and found to work pretty consistently.

I would say that the problems I experienced with fall into two categories: Things that had not yet been created that I needed, and things that HAD been created but did not work correctly.

Taxonomy Search, which I badly needed and which would seem to be pretty valuable to a site which is actually structurally dependent on the taxonomy system, never did work - I gave up on it after a while, and someone was kind enough finally to work up taxonomy browser which does almost the same thing, minus the keyword search. That one thing made the difference between my being able to use Drupal and not on the site. They would not have accepted it without that feature.

Under 4.2, regular Search simply stopped working after a few days. I never did figure out why, and after trying all sorts of things I finally did a reinstall - clean database, clean install. That cured it. However, it would have been a disaster if I had had more stuff in the db at the time, and because I am still leery of that happening again even with 4.3. So every time I add content I back the db up. I consider this a "beta-ish" feature - and am willing to put up with that touchiness because I need the functionality of Drupal. Sure it probably had to do with a module conflict or something, but as far as I am concerned, the modules are central to the functionality that I need, so it doesn't ultimately matter to me if they are part of the core or not. The whole package (at least the features I need) has to work.