Before you start

Could I, for instance have the stories, blogs,and forums be public but have the books be private? I was hoping I could create roles and then use permissions to block access to certain types of content, but when I looked, I saw you could block access to "access content", but there is no control over individual types of content. Any ideas?

I am the founder of the largest community website for the opensource 3d software Blender (www.blender3d.org).
This community (www.elYsiun.com) is largely based around the forum (phpBB 2.0.x). For a while now we’ve been looking into expanding elYsiun into a full community website, attempts at this have been made but due to lack of time and motivation they have never quite been finished.

Now we’re looking very seriously into using an existing opensource php / mysql based CMS, Drupal sure does look to be a very interesting and powerfull implementation. There are however some things we definitely need / want on elYsiun. Two of those things can potentially break the decision to go with Drupal, or any CMS for that matter.

1. The forum
We currently use phpBB as the backbone of elYsiun and I for one would like to keep it that way, or include a forum which atleast comes close to the feature set and usability of phpBB.

2. An article system
Like I said elYsiun.com is a community website for the opensource 3d software Blender. Blender has a very extensive feature set which results in a fairly high learing curve (as with any powerfull 3d software). Over the years experienced users have created hundreds of tutorials for Blender, some very small and some very extensive.
These tutorials tend to be texts explaining how to attack certain problems, illustrated with images and downloads.

I am really impressed with the look of this site, and with wat I hear of the design. It seems that Drupal has a good balance of yin and yang, geek/non-geek. (I guess it is pretty geeky for most but I am fairly geeky).

I am writing to ask about Document Management Capabilities, for mulitiple users, with a folder for "my documents", and "my groups documents", ideally with a "versioning system" (although I am not entirely sure what that is)?

I already have a sizable Drupal site running on a Windows XP Server using Apache 2.0.48, MySQL 4.1.1, PHP 4.3.4, and Drupal 4.3.2. What is the best way to move this entire site over to a Linux server running Apache 2.0.48, MySQL 4.0.17, PHP 4.3.4. Can I just copy the files over? What about the database?

The Linux server is one I own and have root access to and is running Gentoo Linux 1.4 with the 2.6.3 kernel.

In Drupal is it possible to have 2 forums, one for everyone, and an other "by invitation only"? Can the "by invitation only" forum then be invisible for everyone else?

I'm looking to build a personal website. I only really want two areas:

1. Frontpage which also doubles as a blog. People can comment on new updates. I want to be able to possibly format my blog with HTML, such as adding in images. I assume this is fine?