Drupal 7.x

Hi Everyone..I'm very new to drupal and was getting a bit of mixed information about views so I wanted to see if anyone can set me on the right path.

Here's my situation. I have a separate database(on the same drupal database server), that has alot of data thats maintained by another team. We want to publish that data to the web and after getting some suggestions it looks like drupal views is the way to go.

The problem is, I'm not sure where to go from there. I read the docs and just watched the views tutorial on lullabot, but my data isn't in the fields columns at all.

I read one doc that said I had to "describe" my external database to drupal but wasn't sure how to do it. I found a few tools on drupal.org(services, etc..) that said they can analyize my database and report the structure back to drupal but I can't figure it out.

Basically the end result I want is two things. First is to simply display the data as is from my external database onto a drupal node(the only catch is, each page is specific to a database entity so although the data format/display is standard, the data itself will change with the links, for exmaple, www.example.com/ibm should only provide our data on ibm and as the company name changes so does the data thats displayed) and later I might want to run some calculations on the data before it shows up.

I'm writing a module and I'm using a 'text'-type field. I want the data entry box to have some default text in it. I may be missing something obvious, but I can't find out how to add the default text to the field. I presume that this has something to do with the widget?

Cheers,

Cliff

Hi, I am new to drupal, but I'm putting together a new site. I am using the answers module to setup a Q&A page. I am trying to customize the view for the page and would like the header to appear above the menu, but I don't see how to customize the view in this way. Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks.

I want to force a new user to enter a first and last name when he registers. I'm using the profile2 module.

How can I do that?

Thanks

I am new to drupal so this may be a dumb question but a lot of the modules I want to install require the image module, the documentation for which states that it is included in drupal 7. When I look under Configuration - Media, I only see something labeled "image toolkit" which then says "the GD toolkit is installed and working properly." I don't see anything under the Core modules labeled "image". Am I missing something?

I've tried multiple times to install the new Meta Tags Module on Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org/node/640498/release?api_version%5B%5D=103)

Every time I run the installation, it installs successfully, but the module doesn't show up on my list of modules.

Any idea what's going on there? I need to figure out some way to get some meta tags on a site, and so far I'm striking out.