Hello,
I'm an experienced developer (mainly perl) and have never used Drupal even though I've worked on lots of large corporate sites. Now I need to add a limited amount of content management functionality to a small website of my sister's small restaurant so that she and her husband can easily add and edit menus, and also perhaps add a few other pages.
Now I've been thinking of rolling my own with TinyMCE but would Drupal be useful? She has an existing site (www.michaelsonthehill.com) hosted on linux and I am not going to redo the entire thing but just want to add an edit/preview/publish interface for menus and some other dynamic pages (like a hiring page). It has to allow a nonproficient user to easily use a minimal WYSIWIG online editor to get it done quickly, without confusion or destruction. A rollback history function would be nice too.
The site was originally created automatically as a Network Solutions hosted site, and I always have to go in and edit things by hand.
I've been leaning toward an AJAX style editor using a tree or combobox that has checkboxes to show what is being published, and allow files to be moved between folders; public folders would be linked manually into the static site. I don't need a huge portal, just a minimum. I can use a database like mysql if needed.
If Drupal proves useful and also handles Japanese I might consider it for larger projects in the future, but for now I really just want something simple and am looking for the best solution.