Before you start

I am a designer and my client wants a site that has the following features

- search capabilities
- user forum
- the abiltity to add new product pages and set theri order with the sites nav
- the site has 4 product catagories, each of these should have different looks to reflect the product and the CMS should have the ability to create these.
- Have the site be expandable in the future with new top level nav as well as new products.

Hey Everyone,

I am a designer who is finding that more and more clients are looking for a CMS. The problem is they can't afford custom CMS.

I've had a look around the site, but it doesn't really answer my question.
Can I create a custom site for them and then pay a programmer to install and make Drupal work with my already pre-designed site? Or is that not possible? Alternatively to that, is there a better way to go about this? Should Drupal be installed first and then the site created?

Hi everyone,

I run a web design, hosting and marketing company in South Africa. I'd like to host Drupal sites for my clients, but I want it to be as easy as possible to:

- Create a new site
- Upgrade the codebase

I imagine that running multiple sites off of one installation could make my life much easier - but it could also make it much more difficult. Could someone please give me some advice regarding:

Greeetings Drupal Experts,

I was wondering if anyone could take a quick look at my existing site (written in ASP with an Access Database), and offer an opinion as to whether it might be realistically converted to Drupal.

I'm purely an amateur, and developed http://www.gaidus.com/rvtrips/ as a personal record of my families 7 Cross Country (USA) RV Trips.

It grew far beyond my original intent - and I now wish I had programmed it using PHP and MySQL instead.

Hi, I'm trying to design a site based around some basic principles and I'm not sure if drupal is right for me or not.

Basically my site will be first and foremost an information repository/database and a user community secondary. Because of the user community part I'm looking at various CMS platforms, but they seem to be tailored more around publishing somewhat free-form content rather than strict, structured data.

My site will have a database of car information. I want there to be a page for all kinds of cars. The specific criteria will be something like this:

Type
Make
Model
Year
Body style
# of doors

I'd want the above to be searchable and browseable. For example, a user could search for vehicles with Type "Car" and Make/Model parent "Ford", child "Mustang", and Years between 1965-1972. Or, the user could browse to Ford, then Mustang, and get a list of all cars in the Mustang hierarchy for which there is any data.

In each individual car page I'd also want:

A table of consistent information for every car, like "number produced" and "engines available".
An image gallery of pictures of that specific car, if any exist.
User comments

Lastly, I'd love people to be able to edit the information, sort of wiki-style. For instance if someone goes to the 1968 Ford Mustang convertible page and they see there is no data for "number produced", they can add this information. The site would log this revision and allow rollback + show revision history. I know I need 4.7 for revision support.

Does Drupal, either natively, or via a module support a upload/download management area that would be used in the following scenario?

Customers are able to upload and download files in a secure manner, allowing only selected staff and the customer to see the files. Other customers cannot see that customer's files and vice versa. Each customer or user could be given their own directory on the server for their uploads, thereby separating one customer's files from another and allow alternate access to the same files (i.e. point an ftp server to the same directories). Many of the files will be quite large and are highly confidential. It should support uploads/downloads of at least 100MB, preferably support uploads/downloads up to 1GB or more. Files should be saved outside the web root so that they cannot be downloaded from a browser without going through the download manager interface. Files must not be stored in the database, but instead stored in the file system. If possible, and optionally, files should be encrypted (even if a hacker somehow get to the file itself, they can't use any of the files. They have to download the file from Drupal which unencrypts it before downloading).

Is something like that available, either in Drupal or as a module or even as a separate program? I need this kind of solution. It would need to work on an Linux/Apache server with MySQL installed.