General discussion

I have a dilemma that I cannot solve. The more I think about it, the more I attempt to balance the pros and cons, the more perplexing it gets.

The Current Sitiuation

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I have a site running Invision Power Board that allows users to collaboratively plan and organize a national car meet. Lately, I've decided to switch this site to Drupal. Here is where my dilemma begins.

To Convert, to Integrate, or to Use Both

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That is the question. My first plans were to convert the users and their passwords over so that the entire site - including forums - would be powered by Drupal. The drawback I see with this is major unfimiliarity with the users. While I like the Drupal forum set up, it isn't the 'Avatar-showing, post-counting, familiar friend' that Invision, VBulletin, and phpBB have become to so many people. I know I can add bbcode as an input format, but I don't want my users to feel like they're in an alien word, you know?

So then I thought:Hey...why not integrate the two?!. My thinking with this was to integrate the usernames/passwords so that they work across both systems, and only use Invision for the forums, and Drupal for the Pages, Stories, Comments, etc. That's when I realized what a headache and a lot of work that would be.

Next stop: Using both. The sure-fire wire to make things easy for the users would be to continue using Invision for the forums, and not allow comments or registerring of users within Drupal. I could easilly theme Invision to look right at home in my Drupal site. But again: here is where it gets tricky.

Dear all,

First of all, allow me to apologise as after searching this forum, it seems this question has been asked many times before. However, after reading through the various posts, I find myself more confused than I was to start with.

To get to the point, I would like to install one copy of Drupal to: http://blog.domain.com which is then obviously using only 1 database and then I would like to set up multi-blogs as such:

Where is the language file stored (*.po) in webserver tree?

There's no translation for my language on drupal.org, but one site has it.

So I want to download directly language file from that website.

I'm brand new here, and just read through a topic comparing Drupal to Mambo.

IMHO, I think the chances are fairly slim that Drupal is going to catch up with or overtake Mambo. Regardless of whether or not Drupal might be a superior system, there just doesn't seem to be any chance of that.

And I'm not sure if the developers of Drupal even CARE about the comparison to Mambo.
But I'm not a coder, just a marketing clown.

Having had a great amount of experience with Mambo, I'm a big fan of the CMS. For instance, I suddenly had a real estate client pop out of nowhere - so I threw out the possibility of an integration with Open-Realty, and bam. The solution was already in the works, and I was able to employ it for the project.

So Mambo almost has this "Wal-Mart" sort of thing going for it - you can walk in and find just about anything. And from installation to support, it's almost idiot proof. Being an idiot, I can vouch for that :)

BUT...

Mambo is pretty lame when it comes to Drupal's strong points. Run a Google search for "multi-user blog Mambo" and you're going to arrive here. That's how I got here :)

Anyway, PLEASE feel free to remove this entire thread if I'm just showing my complete ignorance here -

But it looks like, with the "Community Plumbing" monicer, you guys are very aware of Drupal's strengths. And it could just be the idiocy of the lemmings (myself included) that Drupal is even in the same boat with Mambo - as far as "CMS Reviews" and all that.

I've got a client who wants a website up very quickly. They initially wanted everything done from scratch to avoid scalability issues down the road. But on the other hand, they only have enough money for a single developer, me. I don't know about the rest of you guys, but it would take me at least a few weeks to lay out a basic framework for a site and design/build up a basic starting point (DB design, DB abstraction interface, template infrastructure, etc) before I could even begin considering even a basic user login screen. It would be a long slow road, and I'm not sure I could keep up with the client's expectations. So instead of rushing in to some half-baked design, I've been researching CMS/frameworks in PHP. I'd nearly given up all hope until someone suggested I take a deeper look at Drupal. After a day of playing with the installation, I'm pretty impressed. It's clean, seems well designed. But before I can really make my case for Drupal complete, I need to address two more issues.

1. I don't have any actual numbers, but based on the fact that sites like Mozilla.org can run successfully on Drupal, I know it can support at least a "medium-traffic" site (whatever that means). My basic argument is that until we are bigger than the largest Drupal site, we shouldn't have any scalability issues that can't be addressed with hardware. Nonetheless, I'd like to point the client to some large/popular/well-known sites that use Drupal. The best examples I've found so far are:
   

I tried searching the forums, but couldn't find anything that quite fit.

Background:
I am running Drupal 4.6.2 (just upgraded from 4.5.1 yesterday) on a Linux 2.4.30 system (hosted by IXWebhosting.com). It's using Apache/1.3.31 (Unix) PHP/4.3.11 mod_ssl/2.8.18 OpenSSL/0.9.6b FrontPage/5.0.2.2635 mod_throttle/3.1.2 with PHP 4.3.11. My account on the server is keithmcd with a group of keithmcd.

Problem:
Although this problem mainly occurs when I'm using the image module, it also occurs when using a core site feature - such as avatar uploading. All uploaded files are set with incorrect permissions. As I do not have shell access to the server, I cannot fix this myself and must request help from my hosting company every time this happens. With Drupal 4.5, all files were set with owner and group of httpd (httpd:httpd) but I could still see the files at least. However, with Drupal 4.6.2, the files are accessible to the outside world, but I cannot see them on the server when I ftp into it.

Question:
Is there an option somewhere - either in the site code itself, or buried on some configuration page - that I can change so that all uploaded files are set to keithmcd:keithmcd with the correct read/write permissions? I do consider myself knowledgeable with Linux, but no-where near good enough to fully comprehend all the permissions variances with Linux (I only know all the 777, etc because WS_FTP Pro lets me type that number in).

Thanks and let me know if anything needs to be clarified.