Before you start

Hi all!

Hi Guys!

I am completely new to Drupal and am only considering it at the moment as I have read such good things about it!

I have been through the pain of hand-coding an entire CMS myself for my uni dissertation, which was a good learning experience but I would like a system like drupal to take away some of the labour.

Basically what I am trying to acheive is multiple sites from the same database and codebase.

I have an internal company portal that we've built many php web "applications" in. (work queue, record detail, edit/save, create record, etc) I'm wondering if it'll be easy enough to build these within drupal? How do you get your application data to show up within the content block of drupal? How do you read usernames and roles in to the app to control who sees what in the app? Can you pass $_GET info to a page in drupal? (for linking between my own php pages, like linking from an order detail screen to a part info screen - part_info.php?part=partnumber)

Thanks!

Hello to all!

I am building my server. I need to build a huge community that, in its ideal form, needs to be this:

- maybe hundreds or thousands of users
- sections: forum, articles (spotlight,news, tutorials, faqs, maybe blogs), polls, links, downloads, image gallery
- 2d chat
- 2d avatars
- calendar of events
- task managers for coders
- buddylist and internal instant messaging via website. I would prefer if users may allow or not another to add them to their buddylist.

And some extrange features like:

- users may have a folder where to upload files that are not public for people. Their folder is just for their use to access. I will generate webpages from the files they upload there later. It is like an account in a server where you upload your files, images, html, etc.
- 2d avatar selection when user registers for first time, so they have 2d avatar from the begining
- be able to add new user fields
- be able to create new groups of users with customized privilegies
- user privilegies in access to sections
- display the groups the user belongs in their public profile
- chose what data can be displayed in the user profile
- login thru ssl
- wysiwyg editors for texts
- defense against sql injection in user entries (and other code injections)

It would be perfect if:

- I can personalize the admin menu
- Or the admin menu is simple

After four years of working extensively to convince a few departments at my high school to utilize Drupal and fruitless pitching a Drupal site to the administration I am now witnessing the school's administration forcing a commercial teacher site system on the staff. I'd really prefer to see this go to Drupal and see this market as something that lacks a cheap, extensible solution. Here's what I invision:

The main site (exampleschool.com) is a Drupal site utilizing the events module to display schedule information (school holidays, sporting events, plays, concerts, etc.), numerous pages for reference information, phone extension lists, etcetera. Additionally, branching off from the main site would be individual teacher sites (exampleschool.com/smith). Now, at first I thought that multi-site would be a great system for this. However, my concern is that I would like the IT people at the school to be able to quickly and easily create and remove teacher sites. I looked at Organic groups, but it looks like each group only gets one page, where these would need to be mini-sites.

I'm starting a website that needs a forum and possibly user blogs. I may change my mind, but at the moment I'm not planning on using Drupal's built-in forum module. I want to use FUDforum or vBulletin since they have integration with 5.x. (I'm not really excited about spending the $85 for vBulletin (though I could be persuaded), so I'm planning to use FUDforum.) But my questions is this: Suppose I start a Drupal website with FUDforum and allow users to have blogs. Later I decide to convert the FUDforum to vBulletin.