Before you start

I’m new to Drupal but can see it has a lot of great, really strong features. Any advice as to whether it is capable of providing what I need and to achieve it would be really appreciated.

We are considering replacing Joomla 1.5 with Drupal 5 and have a few nuts to crack.

Will Drupal support the following (with add-ons?):

-- Product management - Index, management and display of products. No e-commerce, just for display.
-- LightBox functions - Fancy display of images.
-- Multi file upload (images)
-- Dynamic Sitemap, including sitemap.xml

Thanks
PoPsork

I've been looking for a CMS suite to tie into my community site that is based in Invision Forum (IPB). Some other CMS suites seem to tie in better, but I like the direction that Drupal is going.

I think I'm going to try an install of Drupal, and wait for the mod that one of the users is working on to tie the user authentication together. But I have 4 other scripts that I currently use, that I'd like to be able to tie in. They include Esvon classifieds, PHPmyDirectory, and Gallery2. Has anybody ever been able to tie those user databases in?

This will be the first time I have ever upgraded Drupal.

I think the version is 5.0 RC 2. (How do I check this, BTW?) I want to upgrade to 5.1. Where can I get upgrade instructions?

I also want to change my Drupal database collation from US_ASCII to UTF-8. How can I do this without losing the data?

Thanks,
Stephen

Is is possible to set Drupal up so that it manages multiple sites but can "spin off" (to a separate Drupal database) one of those sites quickly and easily in case that the site might be sold to somebody else?

Thank you!

Planning on making a site with lots of funny videos (nothing past PG-rated). Questions:

1) Would Drupal 4.7.x be better than 5.x, given the latter's newness and lower module availability?

2) What module(s) would best help for organizing and showing pictures, Flash videos, WMV videos, etc?

3) What module(s) would be best for managing banner and/or pay-per-click ads that I may put on the site? How about for tracking clicks to/from affiliated sites (link sharing)?