Before you start

Hello,

We're contemplating a switch from an in-house CMS to a commercial one such as Drupal. The main initial usage would be for an internal faculty/staff newsletter.

Here is its current incarnation:
http://west.wwu.edu/fast/

I've got to think Drupal can handle a load like this - but is there any way to download it and play with its design functions, perhaps creating a mockup, without having to do a full blown install onto the university's servers?

Would this host work on drupal and would it be a good host?
http://www.3ix.org/one_dollar_web_hosting.php the $3 USD plan

...who are nonetheless diving in to develop their own Drupal sites:
http://troyschneider.com/blog/31/drupal-5-modules-you-simply-cant-live-w...

Nick Lewis' early-2006 post, "10 Drupal Modules You Can't Live Without," Lullabot's recent "Top 40 Drupal Projects" podcast, and finally Jeff Eaton's post yesterday about building "off-the-shelf" Drupal sites prompted me to finally bang out something I'd been thinking about for some time: Which of the several hundred contributed modules belong on the short list for the rest of us? IE, those who lack the technical chops to do much (any?) custom coding, yet want to build sites ourselves anyway.

My short list for Drupal 5.x is below. For details on why I picked what I did, check out the post on my site.

Does anyone know any cheap($3-4 a month) webhosting that will support Drupal 6.x?

I have managed to - via the help of template.php and profile_listing.tpl.php - create a nice table with my users. I start and end my taple in profile.module like this

 // Extract the affected users:
    $result = pager_query('SELECT uid, access FROM {users} WHERE uid > 0 AND status != 0 AND access != 0  AND uid != 3 ORDER BY uid ASC', 40, 0, NULL);

    $output = '<table border="0"><tr><th class="name">Name</th><th class="phone">Phone</th><th class="work">Work with</th><th class="other">Other info</th></tr>';
    while ($account = db_fetch_object($result)) {
      $account = user_load(array('uid' => $account->uid));
      $profile = _profile_update_user_fields($fields, $account);
      $output .= theme('profile_listing', $account, $profile);
    }
    $output .= '</table>';
    $output .= theme('pager', NULL, 40);

    drupal_set_title(t('user list'));
    return $output;
  }
}

And my profile_listing.tpl.php like this;

1. will this software be able to integrate with phpbb2 and coppermine photo gallery?

2. will this be able to use this software as a news platform? I'll be having atleast 5 categories and would like to post these 5 categories on my Hompage in different tables. So can the categories be called using the functions like:

$news_category='ID' // ID stands for various news category