Before you start

I am an entrepreneur looking to start an ecommerce business for alternative medicines which will be highly driven by content. I am not technical but want to understand what is possible in combining Drupal with other best-of-breed opensource Ecommerce software like OSCommerce or Zen Cart.

I am in the process of building a new site.

The site will largely a content site which, of course, drupal is perfect for.

In addition to the content, I am wanting to incorporate a db of providers dealing with the content.

I will want to include a link to a page with the same theme that will a list of links that will allow the user to drill down from state, to city to get a list of providers pulled from the db. I will want to use mod_rewrite on this to clean up the URLs and make them more indexable as well.

We have all our website data stored in XML and looking for a cms that is XML compatible. It is possible to use drupal with a xml database? Typo3 is not very good for xml, so is drupal?

Is it possible using Drupal to set up a website with a number of different sections, each of which use a different theme.?

Thanks,
Alan.

I am sure this is possible but does anyone know of a drupal installation with this type of drop-down menu installed:

http://www.globalministries.org/index.php

this is a mambo installation with the Trans Menu modeule installed (free from mambotheme.com)

If someone can point me to a drupla page or template with this type of menu.

Are Drupal a file flat databse or not need DBMS like MySQL