Hi, I am currently looking at using Drupal for a rewrite of a large Government website. Our site has thousands of pages, and the structure is 5-6 levels deep in places.
I'm trying to learn what I can from the Drupal documentation and playing around with modules, but must admit it has a steep learning curve. Both of the previous CMSes I've worked on (Sitecore and Silverstripe) use a tree structure to represent pages, and so menus and URLs map quite obviously to pages in the tree. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how this would work in Drupal.
The only way I can see to do it at the moment is to create all of the pages, then link them in a menu and use the Menu Block module to show the correct parts (primary nav: levels 1 & 2, secondary nav: levels 3+). But with thousands of pages, wouldn't this create a menu that is too difficult to manage using the Drupal Admin interface? The documentation I've read about menus show sites with only 10 or so pages so this isn't a problem for them.
I have also just started to read about taxonomy, which I can see working well for some content like News and Events but I'm less sure about more static pages that we would like to place in a specific part of the site. (e.g. if we retrieve all the pages tagged as a "policy", can these be ordered however we like or does it have to be alphabetical?)