Before you start

I'm in the process of building a new site which would be centered around the poker scene in las vegas, but I'm having a bit of trouble finding the right CMS. If you take a look at my website as it is www.theroadtotilt.com you will see the basics of how I want it laid out. Now to the right, you will see links to various casinos around town. I need static articles like those (red rock is the only developed one). I will have about 40 or so of them giving poker room reviews.

We are a non-profit and are starting up a new website. I'd like to know if Drupal is suitable for what we need, or should we be going somewhere else. I understand that this is a Drupal forum (!) but I'd really like some honest advice as I've tried other public forums and I feel that people are making me go around in circles, jumping ...

What we need:
- A site which is graphically professional, and therefore would like a CMS that allows us to customize the look of the website.
- We will have the normal website pages, such as contact, who we are, etc that are static.
- We will have regular news items posted by a handful of members who are *not* programmers but, let's say, knows how to use FrontPage or similar apps.
- We will also have events regularly that need posting onto the website, again by non-programmers or web designers.
- We will have 3 different groups of users, e.g. A, B, and C. Group A will have their own area that they can see notices and will have a forum that they can use. Group B will have access to the areas of Group A, but will also have their own area (with information and forums) that Group A can't access. Group C is similar to Group B.
- Our member's registration will not only require members to use their email address and password, but will have other information such as phone numbers and addresses, and a number with one or two other pieces of information. But they are only required to log-in with their userID and password.

Am sure it's possible, but does anyone know what would be involved if a user that was being hosted on a multi-site install of drupal (meaning common code base, multiple sites) wanted to move to a different server and run their own install?

Multi-sites don't get their own cpanel do they? So you can't really do a full one-click back up like you could if it were a standalone install, right?

I am attempting to evaluate Drupal as a CMS for our company intranet. The site navigation is currently based on departments within the company (Human Resources, Legal, Planning, etc.) My goal is to assign indivdual users access to add/modify content for their specific department only. The layout of pages would be controlled by templates & css.

Im starting a new project and I want to make sure the Drupal is a good option to use.

I want to create a website all about Thailand. There will be a few main sections to the website. The first will be information about each particular area/provence/city in Thailand. I will write several pages about each little city in Thailand. Each area will have standard sections of information, such as, "How to get here", "where to stay", "Where to eat", "getting around", "things to see", etc.

For each location I will add classifers to it. So when I add a city I might choose "Mountins", "Jungle", "Diving", "Beaches", etc to it. This is because I also want people to search for locations to travel to based on activity, such as beaches.

The other main section of the website will be a business directory. This will be integrated into the city listings as well. Hotels, resturants, stores, etc, will pay me a fee to be listed on my website. I will add their page into the directory and also link it to a location. So a bar in bangkok would get listed as a bar, and assigned to bangkok. A hotel in samui would get listed as a hotel under the location of samui. This is so people can do searches for various things based on location.

This directory will need to be integrated into the city listings. So if I am reading the Bangkok page, under "Where to Stay" I will have a few paragraphs of text and then the website should pull out 3 listings from the business directory and list it under. Then it would show "Where to eat" and I will write a few paragraphs about dinning in bangkok, then it should pull 3 resturants from the business directory, etc. I want each location to be able to display any buinsess of a certain category.

I´m panicing, I´ve decided on Drupal as my cms but talk about a learning curve! It´s a bare sheer faced cliff! Especially for someone like me who has no experience with php, mysql or apache. I´ve ordered books on all of those but there is no drupal tutorial at amazon. Only one that deals with phpbb, wordpress and drupal. I think I´ll need a lot more that a few chapters to understand.

So if anyone knows of good tutorials please let me know, even if they are aimed at more advanced users I still might be able to figure something from them.

Thanks in advance (I hope :)