Before you start

I'd like to know if drupal would serve as a viable and easy to manage solution for my publishing needs. Most of the features I need are very nicely implimented as far as I've seen, but I have a few needs I'd like help filling. If anyone knows a viable existing solution for drupal or has any pointer/advice to help satisfy one of these needs please let me know:

I would like to develop an organized and easily-updatable (by admin, but maybe eventually by users) iformation site. The main necessity is being able to classify, display, and search for "news" items by
mulitple categories and sub-categories (fields) such as geographical location etc.

The number of indentifying fields attached to each "article" would ideally be around 15 and some would be input (e.g. contact name, e-mail) whereas others would be selection (e.g. location, category/subcategory).

I'm looking for an off-the-shelf CMS for a writing community that has outgrown the homemade CMS w/ phpBB integration that we started on.

I tried phpnuke, postnuke, cpgnuke, mambo, e107 and xoops.
What I need is a feature rich Forum(eg. phpBB, Invision, SMF), Gallery(eg. Coppermine) and Blog system(eg. wordpress). All 3 must be integrated into CORE.

What are the available solutions(modules/plugins) DRUPAL has for above 3 systems?

Which version of DRUPAL(4.x) has highest available and updated add ons?

Thanks.

Hi all,

I'm currently the webmaster for a community-oriented site for librarians to discuss copyright questions/problems, which is running on PHPNuke right now. I'm a little dissatisfied with PHPNuke - I'm sick of defacements, and my ideas for scaling it up are proving more difficult than I'd like. I'm considering shifting to another CMS, and drupal has been recommended to me many times, but I'm not too sure of how well it will fit. I need a couple of particular features:

* I would like to be able to basically set it up and then leave. I'm a former intern who still does some contract work for the people I'd be setting this up for, and so it's uncertain that I'll be involved with upkeep indefinitely. I'd like to be sure that if I set this up, it will be able to run happily even if I'm not always available. There will be basically no long-term technical person responsible for the site.

* While I am comfortable with setting up and running most whatever, many of my users have almost no experience with blogs, community sites, etc. I want to be able to simplify the site a lot - blog posting needs to be trivial for an unexperienced user, even those who aren't really interested in learning how the software works. Forums should be the same - it should be immediately clear and simple to post, read, etc, without extraneous functionality. This site needs to be usable by anyone, including someone who has never used a web forum before and never will again. The real backend stuff, I don't mind - the only parts which will be interactive with the users will be the forum, and for *some* users (btw, can I have different 'classes' of user? i.e. Admin (myself), moderator, and general?), blogging, but these parts must be very clear and straightforward for an unexperienced user.

Can i use Drupal together with MS Access 2003 as data base?