General discussion

I was really impressed with the way drupal installed on 3 different architectures - OS/X Tiger, Win XP. and AIX 4.3. It is also very easy to set up a "standard" CMS site. However, and there is always however, I have difficulties orienting myself in what to use for creating a "non-standard" structure. I need this:

Home page: A page describing the web purpose and regirstration instructions with some selected "stories" and without ability to submit comments. The page has log in item.

Home page after succesful login: Same as the home page above with added menu items and allowing comments. The menu should allow access to

blogs by blogger or by blog entry (... reading selected interesting blog entries or an interesting blogger approach)
A forum with topics listed the same way as here in this forum

My users are not your typical internet savvy kids - this is a community site of people who prefer to read newspaper and books. We are trying to attract them to web usage but the original site, which I inhereted is extremely confusing (though it is drupal). I, too, was lost at first. So, I would like to start with a functionally minimalistic but design rich site.

So, is the bulk of what I need present in the core or is it done by themes, code, what. How do I ensure that I don't have to re-implemet customization with new releases.

Thanks for any thoughts, pointers to sharp tutorials or articles.

I host Drupal sites on my server. Some ISPs are flagging my server as a spammer and refusing to send email the server sends to users.

There is no evidence of a malicious script exploiting a Drupal security hole to use my server as an open relay and my server doesn't appear on the major blacklists.

The two ISP's in particular I'm having problems with are AOL and people with email addresses hosted on Godaddy's servers. I'm not the only one, either. Please see:

I wondering what is different between this 2 versions ?

The model looks like this:
HOSTS - web host company (hostid,hostname)
PLANS - types of hosting (shared, vps, dedicated)
PACKAGES - plans offered by different web hosts (many-to-many here)
I am unsure of how to implement this model in Drupal, here are my initial thoughts.
PLANS is just a name or title, so this can be taken care of by the Vocabulary? e.g. Vocab PLANS with terms Shared, VPS, etc.

I would like to know how ot add My Discussion to my forum like shown here on this forum.

Also are there any tricks to make this appear more like a traditional forum with replies and PMs?

Can I list all content published by a particlular user on his profile page or on a user page?