Before you start

I want to create a site very similar to slashdot (not in terms of content, but in basically every other way). I don't want to use slash/slashcode for various reasons, the main ones being that slash seems like a bit of a spaghetti-code hack and I really don't enjoy working with Perl. Could I use Drupal?

I have installed and am running drupal 4.4.2 locally on my pc. I am getting ready to launch the website on the net.

I want to know whether it is (a) possible (b) advantageous to upgrade locally and then upload or
to instal version 4.5 on the server and then import the themes and nodes - if that is even possible?

How can this be done in Drupal:

The club I whose site I am running has a member-list they want available online. Currently, to update it requires making an addition to the HTML table and re-uploading it. Not hard, but time consuming.

Does a Drupal module offer display of all users (name, address, phone, e-mail, etc) in a tabular format? Can this be taken off / synchronous with the Drupal memberlist?

Then, regarding a club calendar: Could I take a product such as Calendarix or phpicalendar (php/MySQL-based) and insert them into a Drupal page?

I'm just having a look at 4.5.0 for a new project - I must say the team has packed some great goodies for usability into this one. Well done, fantastic effort! I'm looking forward to playing with it.

I'm really interested in looking at Drupal's suitability for a large, campus-wide educational installation.

Has anyone scaled up to this size before? What are the bottlenecks we're dealing with?

Issues off the top of our head:
* Shibboleth for WebISO - Apache module, passes env variable for login
* LDAP population, attributes of accounts (or dynamic creation w/ first login [see above])
* Scaling for editing
* Scaling for output - creative use of Squid, Accelerators
* DB support?

I'm just wondering if there was a way that users could submit links (and maybe descriptions) into certain categories. Like pages, just... links.

And is flexinode 4.5 compatible?

Tom