Before you start

Happy New Year All.

First post here and it's a bit of a bigger one, if it's in the wrong spot let me know.

Either way, as the title shows, I'm looking at moving off of the technologies that currently house our external (Ektron) and internal (SharePoint) web presence. Drupal is high on the list of products to use namely because it's open source and has such a large community behind it.

That being said, I figure instead of reading and searching all over the place for answers to my questions, I would post here first to see what people who know this system have to say first. Basically there is a list of items that people on the above 2 systems are using now, and wherever I move them off to, that same level of service should be maintained.

If you can only answer 1 or a couple that's great! If the functionality doesn't exist out of the box but you are aware of modules/services that can do it (free or not) please let me know.

If you have a question about an item, please let me know.

SharePoint Specific Items

S1 - Self site creation: This is the ability to allow the average user to create their own web pages built off of developer created templates.

S2 - Self service permissions: Basically gives the average user the ability to deal with permissions on pages or folders without IT intervention.

I am completely new to Drupal and am hoping to use it to develop a site for my firm. I'm hoping that someone can give me input on figuring out how we should decide whether to do the work ourselves or contract out the work, and how I should go about giving my boss an estimate of how much effort it will take to develop a functional site. My own time is fairly cheap and I am fairly quick to learn new technologies, but I am worried about overpromising and underdelivering. I have included a list of things we hope our site will be able to do below. I saw that many of these things appeared in the site highlighted on drupal's main page (http://drupal.org/node/970144), but I also noticed in the case study writeup that this effort was undertaken by 7 people.

The overall site should include:
A resource library that users can add to
Provide overview information and a list of resources and groups

Groups should be able to:
Have a web area that feels like an independent website
Make content available only to their members

Users should be able to:
Share and (collaborate on?) files
Find out about important events
Follow the latest activity on the site
Follow latest news related to a topic or group
Share videos and photos
Discuss topics in forums
Hold web conferences?
Sign in and follow content using other social media sites: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc.

Hi everyone,

Will themes and modules created from here on out work on Drupal 6, or only on 7? I imagine it's case by case, but overall, will version 6 users be limited only to what has been created up to this point? If so, that would be one important reason to make the presumably hectic transition from 6 to 7.

Thanks,

Stevenpn

Hi,

I've got a site where users will need to provide a few extra details when registering (such as name, address and the like). However, I would like to fields to appear in a "logical" order. What are my options when it comes to this?

I have had a look at the Profile module, and at first glance it looks fair enough. However, one thing i dislike is that it splits the various Profile categories into different tabs on the user page. I would really like to have only a single user page which displays all the details. Any chance that can be achieved with the profile module?

Right now, we use Upload Path to handle a gazillion file uploads on our website. Love it.

As we, and everyone else, consider moving to D7, it would be nice to know how D7 will handle file uploads. Any ideas? This is the only major issue holding us back from moving forward in the next couple of months...

Hi,

Let's say i'd like to set up the site www.news.com, tv.news.com and radio.news.com. Regardless of where a visitor lands first and logs in, the user should be logged in at all the other sites. In other words, i guess we're talking about sharing session and user data between the sites.

Is it possible to tie each site to its own database, and avoid using a table prefixing solution where the various sites simply share the user and session tables?

Any input highly appreciated!