Before you start

Hi gang,
My first post here :)

I downloaded Drupal after looking at lots of other CMS programs and trying a few. What got my attention wiht Drupal was the user base, feel and mods. I hope I've made a good descision.

Anyway, I sitting around right now reading the user manual while I wait for a new domain name to clear the system. And I thougth I would ask the group about something that gives me a problem wiht software at times.

I am starting an online portal for Veterans, and was wondering if Drupal can provide a user-customized RSS feed page (similar to the one offered by MetaDot http://www.metadot.com/metadot/userchannel.pl)...

I'm going to set up a page for a programmer group.

Feature requast (so far) are:

- There is a special group of users, the "programmers".
- New registered users belong to the group "guests". The only thing they can do is post comments on news or blogs.
- Only Users can post anything (this is to prevent spam).
[Alternative is, there are only a fixed number of Members - the programmers. No new Users can be registered.]

- There are 4 public sections: News, About, Projects, Members, Guestbook

- News is simply something like a blog all programmers can write into, maybe with a welcome-message above because this will be the starting page.

- About will be a quite static page with some text and maybe images.

- Projects is a bit more complex. There will be several project listed, with title. Maybe something like an icon for each project, and if possible devided into several cathegories like "tools" or "games".
- each project will have an extra page. this page shall contain a longish description and again something blogish, so we can all post into a project diary. Maybe it is enough to do the description as a 'sticky' post into the blog. Additional features could be something like an image gallery, download section, documentation.
- each programmer should be able to add a new project to the site, edit the description/images/download links/documentation and add a post into the diary. As this will be blogish, other users can comment the diary.

I was directed to Drupal because I was seeking software that would allow me to run a site that allows other people to register and create their own blog pages.

Does Drupal support this?

I was about to download it, but then noticed that it said "Drupal can support a diverse range of web projects ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven sites."

With Drupal will I be able to start a site like blogger.com? I don't want my PERSONAL blog, I want a site that is capable of allowing users to sign-up so THEY can EACH have their own blog pages.

Yet Another Multiple Site Question

I'm looking at rationalizing my web offerings.

Which is a fancy way of saying I maintain a handful of web sites, using various home-spun and OS site engines. This is becoming less and less manageable as time goes on. I'd like to combine them all into one site engine.

The sites are inter-related. So what I would ideally like to do is run all the sites with the same engine in the same database. But, people who come to one of my sites are looking for one thing, people coming to another are looking for another.

This is more complex than using different themes for each site. One site is providing content. I'd like visitors to that site to be greeted with the familiar site portal type interface, with the latest articles, what's new etc etc. Another site provides software, so I'd like the visitors to that site to be greeted with some brochureware style screens and downloads.

However, as people from each of the sites drill in further they tend to become interested in the other site, so having the same engine powering the same site, with the same content available (apparantly) deeper into the site the user visited would be nice.

Essentialy, it's a case of a different theme and navigation structure for each site run out of the same Drupal interface. I'm about to install a test Drupal interface to have a poke beneath the covers, but is this something that will be possible or impossible? Where would I start?

My situation is that I have a site with several subdomains and I wish for them to share a single user database and also a single permissions database. I understand that this can be done by sharing the same table prefix for users and would appreciate if somebody could shed a bit more light on this for me; will it involve me hunting down all references to the user table and altering them, or is there a simpler solution.