Before you start

Is Drupal suitable for a community organization that needs to connect agencies prividng resources and services and customers neding to find those resources?

For instance Agency X needs a website with:

hi all.

this is my third time trying to build a site using drupal, and i'm getting sort of frustrated.

every time i come back to the same places on this site and i don't seem to be comprehending anything. i write php every day and somehow i am just not getting the concept of drupal. the last time i set up an install i had a theme that somewhat resembled what i was going for, but i couldn't seem to get anything i wanted to happen.

I'm looking at moving an association web site into Drupal.

There are member and non-member (open to anyone) content areas. Access to the member areas is via login (all this I'm sure Drupal does).

The membership database is maintained off-line in an association management system. It can be exported into a Excel file containing name, company, address, phone, email, membership type, date dues are paid through, etc. This would need to be imported into Drupal, with any updated data overwriting the existing data in Drupal (in other words the web users don't have the ability to change any of this data). The username and password could be the email address and the last 4 digits of the phone number (this is not a high security site, we just want to keep casual viewers out of the members only area). Of course if there were a way to let users create their own screennames and passwords, yet keep the ability to update, that would be better.

I need a member directory.
If a non-member is viewing it, they can see the type, company name, city and state.
If a member is viewing it, they can see the contact information (address, phone, email).
If the member's dues paid through date is less than today (e.g. their dues aren't current), they disappear or get marked as elapsed.
Ideally it would be nice to be able to filter by type, state, etc. and sort by any field.

At some point it might be that we'd want to move the whole association management system onto the site, maintaining the membership records via the web, if that were to come it would be several months while we get used to the tools.

Hi,

Does Drupal have support (whether natively or through an existing module) for Google AdSense and accepting payments through eGold?

Thanks,
grimholtz

I need to install Drupal.
I also want to install phpmyadmin but I realize that they have folders and files with same names. So probably one of these two programs must be installed in a different subdirectory.
Which is the best choise? I mean, is better to install DRUPAL in the "publich htm" root and the PHPMYADMIN in a subdirectory or viceversa ?
Thanks

I am using flatforum and I can make changes in node-forum to create a look that I want. But every change I make in this file apears for every comment in a thread. Where can I make changes that will only effect the original post?

Like for example, I want to put a header on the forum above the first post that contains the post title, breadcrumb, etc but if I try and do this in my forum file then it puts these items above every single reply too. How can I single out only the first post?