Before you start

We've been setting up a site for our college for about a month now, using Joomla.
http://www.dur.ac.uk/StChadsJCR
The hosting is provided by the university (Durham) and I've been having some problems; I wondered if they could be solved by using Drupal.

1) The hosting has been acting a bit strange with Joomla, and installing components is a nightmare as php_safemode is always on (and cannot be removed). Is this also the case with Drupal? Also, I know that mod_rewrite is not supported, is this crucial? Is there a work around?

2) This is a community site - we would like everybody in the college to be able to log in and post news articles. Individual member profiles/blogs are not a necessity but might be nice to have. What attracted me to Drupal was that community elements seemed to be built in a lot better than Joomla, which uses Community Builder, which I can't get to work properly.
We would like anybody to be able to sign up and post to the forums (ie prospective students) but only students from St. Chad's College to be able to post news and to vote in elections and polls. I asked my computing service and they didn't know how to do it but told me there were a couple of php functions - $_SERVER['REMOTE_USER'] and getContactDetailsFromLDAP() which could be used inside the 'password' folder to verify a student's college based on their Durham University username.

Would it be possible to implement these into a login screen to verify that the user was a Chad's student (by looking at their username) and thus give them access to certain parts of the site?

What does a Drupal Book look like when you have the rights to contribute and how does it compare to a Wiki?
I want to see it in an environment where you maintain a page, track the history, allow editing and allow comments. Would be nice if you also can get alerts when somebody make a change and if it would be possible for certain sections or pages to include some workflow approval.
Is there also a possibilty to apply publishing date?

I am looking to build a site very similar to http://tripadvisor.com
And I have three basic questions for you drupal experts out there ;)

Is this kind of site well suited for drupal?
Does anyone know of a "pre-built" drupal solution similar to this? - could be open source, or commercial
Does anyone know of a group or company that develops drupal components? (Kind of like mosets.com for joomla)

thanks!

My site, using older myPHPNuke code just got pulled because of an XSS exploit.

Now is the time to PANIC!!!

We have beening thinking for some time of switching to Drupal and now have the kick in the pants to do it. Its a corporate site were we want to be able to present products, faqs, howto articles, perhaps blog a bit, just generally supply our clients with a healthy dose of information and help.

We have a website which currently runs on dragonflycms.
We like to change over to drupal script now onwards
Wanted to know if can we transfer existing members in our website to drupal script so that old members who have already registered there can have the same id and password and does not require new registration for the same...
is it possible and how?
and also can content from old site can be imported to new drupal based script?
cheers and good wishes
Hitesh

Just about to start up with Drupal...

Have spent a couple of days installing 4.6.6 mainly due to .htaccess issues that were resolved with the help of forum users.. now moving on to learning about how to add content, categories etc.

In the interim, it seems that the RC1 of 4.7.0 has been released.

Given that the installation of 4.7.0 should not be a real problem given that I have just gone thru the process, should I simply skip straight to 4.7.0 ....