Before you start

Hello everyone! This is my first post here at Drupal.org.

Hi,

I have a static site www.wilson-intl.com that i am planning to convert to drupal. I would like to have some inputs on how drupal would be of help in this project.

Thanks you very much.

Does anyone know how to include %username in a simplenews email? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

So we're mucking around with our homeschooling website, and already I've encountered the potential need to hack together some modules.

I have, on hand, one almost graduated software engineer who is willing to assist, which is great because I suck at anything that has anything to do with programming or scripting beyond layout tweaking. The problem is, the almost graduated software engineer in question isn't particularly interested in picking up php. He's good at java, and has told me that he can achieve the things we want done using java and Tomcat (whatever the latter one is besides a male feline).

So...I was wondering. How hard would it be to implement java tomcat application applet thingamies (so bad with terminology, hopefully someone will vaguely comprehend that sentence) into Drupal? Or at least maybe use php to pull information out of them? I'm guessing I would have to do some fun things with custom modules to be able to either integrate or pull the data. Which I'm hoping is easier than trying to write my own things in php considering it takes me way too long to wrap my brain around this kind of stuff.

Examples of what we want done:

In the user profile forms (which I really want to tweak the layout of, might have to give this CCK thing a go) there is a section for how many kids a user has. There are three fields associated with the kids, a name, a birthdate and a gender. I have a field called "Number of kids" in which I want the user to type how many kids they have (oddly. Say 3). User types the number in, and three sets of kid associated fields come up in a nice grid assuming I can manage something like that:

Hey Everyone,

I just wanted to make a post with my ideas for a website and to see if Drupal would be a solution. I don't exactly know much about implementing and using Drupal so, I will need help there to begin with.
Anyway, I want to make a goecaching site for people who use geocaching to give away Rosaries or other religious articles. However, I don't want to try to figure out how to pull all of the cache data from geocaching.com .

First off, I was wondering if it would be possible to set up a user database for the site that would allow users to log of caches through the upload of that cache's GPX file. A GPX file is an XML based file that has all of the details of the coordinates for the cache, what its name is etc. I would also want the database to recognize whether or not that cache information already exists so that not everyone would have to upload the file. I want the date the cache was found to be automatically selected as the date they log it. I also want a couple of dropdown lists of categories for the database like "found it", "didn't find it" "Found Geocoin/TravelBug, Geocoin Name", "Removed/Travel Bug Geocoin, geocoin name" "Left Rosary, Left "whatever", took nothing left nothing", and lastly an area for the person to write in any other observations they want as part of the log.

Ok, if this wasn't enough, I also want all the users in that database to be set up to use a forum using their same username and password. Although, if you can do all the stuff in the first question with Drupal, that shouldn't be an issue.

I was wondering - how many categories can you have? And how many subcategories can a category have?

If you have more than a certain amount, does it start slowing down?

Come to think of it, how many posts can Drupal handle before slowing down? How many users?

I use NearlyFreeSpeech.net, if that helps.