General discussion

I'm looking for help regarding the cms web development paradigm & standards-based development. I'm looking for opinions.

I've done my research, and am comfortable that Drupal is the cms for me.

Please bear with me as I share a little - and I mean little - background information:

I started studying web related technologies about 2 1/2 years ago. I got turned on to web standards: XHTML, CSS, ECMAscript, etc. I also started studying LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), so that I could do some minor back-end admin stuff.

I got started hand coding xhtml and css using web standards (thanks to "Designing With Web Standards", "Bullet Proof Web Design", "Head First HTML with XHTML & CSS", "The Zen of CSS Design: Visual Enlightenment for the Web", etc.). As I'm considering moving over to a cms paradigm for web development, I'm concerned about my ability to "produce" and "design" productively and efficiently.

I'm setting up a business model, where the client has some varying degree (depending on the client's desire) of control over their site's content, and where I (or them, if I can make it child's play) have the ability to add website functionality without major remodeling of the site.

What I want to know, is - "Can I have my cake and eat it too?": Can I use the power of Drupal as a cms - and all that it provides - while maintain the XHTML/CSS/JavaScript discipline? And a corollary: Can I do this as efficiently as if I were hand-coding in a text editor? {I started hand-coding, and can't get used to other WYSIWYG editors for production or stylizing. Eventually - when the editor isn't a crutch - I'll probably use one.}

It was easy to figure out how to set it up but now how do I like to the forum itself or to the containers?

Also is their a mod where people can add avatars?

I am trying to display a directory of Sections and Categories in the center of my page. I would then like for the users to be able to submit to the categories by selecting a section then a category. How might I begin to set this up?

Thanks!

Ok,
99.99999999999% of the time contributed modules on Drupal work...the htmlwrap.module is the exception to this rule. It's happily sitting in the 4.7 releases and I do not know why. Perhaps, I'm wrong on this but I doubt it. When I install the module and turn on the filter, the site is inaccessible. I literally must remove the module itself from the modules directory in order to get my site back.

Has anyone gotten this to work on 4.7.3? If not, are there any alternatives? I don't want to be at the mercy of some joker fiddling with my template.

thanks,

larry

I am tryin gto get my mind around this. I am coming from Joomla community. I understand that the man text will be displayed in the middle but what if I need a little snippet of text like "Welcome to my community" that appears on every page?

I have task scheduler set to run every 5 minutes. It opens up a browser to cron.php (which has some extra php to close the browser when it is done). My problem is, when cron.php is run by the task scheduler, it doesn't correctly fill search_dataset. It only adds 2 (of 38) nodes. If I manually go to cron.php it works. It even works if I manually run the task from the task scheduler (right click->run). Any thoughts on this? It seems really strange to me.

Thanks for any input.