Before you start

Hi all! As I have revealed in some recent postings, I am experimenting with drupal a lot and I expect to be deploying it online here very shortly.

Our current system is actually running geeklog, and I spent many hours figuring out the finer points of both database layouts so I could write a 500-line php script to convert all users, stories, and comments over to drupal. (That's right, I have a fully-functional geeklog->drupal converter. w00!) I have also written a good amount of custom theme, filter, and block code.

Okay, maybe my Google-fu and Search-fu isn't up to snuff, but what's the latest word on the feasibility of using Drupal 4.6 with MS SQL Server? I read that support stopped at 4.4 because there wasn't anyone maintaining the initial database definition, but has there been any further news on this front? Is the creation of the initial tables the only obstacle here, or are there other compatibility issues involved as well?

--R.J.
http://www.electric-escape.net/

Hi there,

First off I just wanted to say thanks for taking a minute to reply to these. I have been reading bits and pieces of the Drupal handbook. But since I've been hearing these forums are a great help, I figure I'd save myself some time (for now) and ask away. If my question seems vague, it probably means I'm asking for an explanation or URL to a page where it's explained how to do something. Here goes:

1: Can the news system show the 20 latest headlines on the left-top side of the site? With that I mean that it doesn't just look like a blog with the news in the centre of the frontpage. Kind of like this maybe www.saeger-in-web.de only more like newsitems on the right side as a website like this www.fok.nl Maybe this can be accomplished by shrinking the font size?
2: Is RSS automatically put on the site, like installing the Syndication script? Will RSS be syndicated from the Drupal newsitems automatically, or do I need to do something aside from enabling it in Drupal ? (What's Atomfeed or Feedburner for, do I need to subscribe to that and link it to my site running Drupal to get RSS to work?)
3: Is Statistics tracking included for visitor#/url tracking? Or is that new in 4.6?
4: Can the user login menu be made smaller or put at the bottom of each newsitem? It kind of looks like YES, see http://drupal.org/node/13777
5: How do I devide my newsitems into categories?

Would like the root of the site to show some marketing stuff and a "subscriber login".

A company would subscribe (by filling out a form and mailing a check to our company). We would setup the account and provide access to download data template files. They upload the completed templates to the site. Our people do the analysis and place the subscribers results on the site in such a way that only that subscriber can see his/her company's results.

Also need an area where subscriber can privately exchange messages with analysts with questions about results.

Hi Guys !

I started building a new personnal website on a music band 3 weeks ago. Before starting I spoke with a friend who suggested I start using a CMS. Because:

1- I needed certain sections of my site restricted to members only (especially the download area)
2- An extensive news publishing system and archiving solutions
3- Ultimately have members have their own blog area to share concert review, album reviews, etc.
4- A flexible forum

Now, for the past three weeks I tried Joomla. I learned PHP and CSS on the side (still a lot to learn). I read god knows how many tutorials and pdf to understand the templating solution. I did.

But then I came to the most frustrating thing, and this is why I dropped Joomla today. It is NOT flexible at all. To help you understand what I mean, you can take a look at the page I made in HTML (show to see what I would like):
http://www.nightwishonline.com/design4.php

My frontpage will be a headlines page leading to the full story. But you see the headlines on this link I gave you? To have Joomla display my headlines like this, I had to hack the core files TWICE (and it took a long time to make it succesful):
1- First hack to display the category of the news on the same line as the date
2- Have the image float on the left side of all the text, not just the intro-text

I gave up this morning. I looked for other CMS, and a good friend of mine suggested e107. I read quite many excellent reviews, and the good point, that the support of the community was extraordinary, much more than any other open source CMS community.

I have been doing some research and have compiled a database of information that some people would pay for in order to access. I would like to use Drupal's taxonomy system to organize my information. The site would have to be secure, so that the database is only accessable to paid subscribers. Visitors to the site would perhaps view a different homepage that tries to convince them to join. Are there any modules for this? I would probably be using worldpay as the payment provider. I know that there is the ecommerce module, but does that support worldpay?