Before you start

Hi all, this is my first post...

I was told by several of the folks on the WSG-CMS list that Drupal should meet my needs, but I just wanted to ask here first, before committing.

Here are my main requirements, not in any particular order:

I am wondering if it is possible to somehow have Drupal show an alternate version of my site that has different HTML, but has the same content?

I'd like to either go to a different URL, or add something to the query string, and have the site display an alternate version of the site. This alternate version would be a simplified version, that doesn't have fancy graphics, etc. Is this possible?

The install file says to install drupal in the root of the www or public directory

e.g.

/var/www

or

/home/widgets/public_html

This installs a whole load of files and directories which are probably not needed.

Can the bulk of Drupal be installed outside this public space with only key files left in place?

e.g.

/home/widgets/drupal (this has subdirs files modules etc.)
/home/widgets/index.php (this will pick up on the location of drupal e.g. include /home/widgets/drupal...)

i'm curious if the latest versions for Drupal (5.1), PHP (5.2.1) and MySQL (5.0.37) are known to all work together with no issues? or is there a reason to stick with a previous version on any of these for now?

I have a static site with about 50 pages. Is it possible to convert this site to Drupal and keep the existing file names?

e.g. here's a selection of pages:

widgets.com/blue_widgets.html
widgets.com/widgets_maintenance.html
widgets.com/future_widgets.html
widgets.com/seminars.html
widgets.com/shop/widget_food.html
widgets.com/shop/widget_brushes.html
widgets.com/shop/contact_us.html

Hi,

We have a struts (1.2) based web application deployed on linux machine. We want to enhance its features by providing social networking, discussion forums and blogs.

I have gone through drupal and its features are just what we are looking for but I am unable to find out how we can integrate it with our existing website.

The web application uses

JDK1.5
Tomcat 5.1
MYSQL 5.0

My questions are