Before you start

Hi everyone,

I am looking to create a website similar to www.ewedding.com but with a few changes. Before I install Drupal, I would like to know if it will help me create what I am looking for.

Hey guys!

First, I should shortly tell why I'm posting this message, in which conditions, and then I'll go further on with the details.
So:
- I'm French
- I'M working in an internship in a worldwide corporation that is also based in France, that does not want its name to be mentioned.
- They need some kind of an internal social Hub to coordinate their work and relations
- I love open-source
So that's for short; now let me get into more details :P

This company wants to acquire a much more advanced and user-friendly kind of intranet-based website, much more orientated on the "social" part than the intranet engine they currently use.
I'm also, currently, doing an internship in this corporation, in the IT service (you probably guessed).
They asked me if I didn't have any Idea on how to make their local network more dynamic, more transversal and productive, less formal than a simple project organizer (kinda like CVS, but for entreprise projects).

What they need is a mix that blends Facebook/Yammer, a wiki, blogging, news, and collaborative work.
I immediatly thought about Django, that's got a huge numbers of very powerful modules, all linked together into a stable base.
Although, there are some requirements, and that's why I'm here to ask if Jango can fullfill these requirements. They'll need:

G'Day, I developed these php driven sports website applications, (http://clubsupportal.com), with its own content management system including JavaScript form checks, etc. a few years ago, 2006. I spent a great amount of time on them. I am a certified database administrator who learnt php and developed these applications which aren't OO php. I researched all the popular php frameworks today, and it appears that Symfony seems to be the way to go, if my interpretation is correct. I may be completely wrong, as I have only read blogs today without trying it. I write php, html, sql code using notepad and now deciding whether to go with Drupal or a php framework to convert clubsupportal.com. I initially thought of using Drupal for the basic stuff, basic web pages, news, and photogallery. To incorporate the intracacies of the sports results, both current and archived, as well as the archiving process at the end of each season, and the generation of a new fixture, as with my current application, CAN I ACHEIVE THIS WITH DRUPAL or I am I better off learning Symfony. Is there a Drupal Symfony module that will allow me to incorporate the sports stuff with Drupal for its roles, pages, blogs, forums, advertising and Galleria/Lightbox2/jCarousel modules, etc. ?

Any wisdom would be welcome before I plunge into the depths.

Regards
Kevin

First, the website in question: http://www.richardmccord.com
Purpose of the site: To display my writing online to include single-page poems and rants, to
multiple page stories.

I am running Drupal 6.17 on CentOS 5. Does any one know how to integrate Drupal login with an external existing OpenLDAP server on CentOS 5?
Any direction, pointer, URL, e-book or hint would be greatly appreciated.

I'm not sure Drupal is the ideal tool for this, so please feel free to suggest another (but my experience is that people here always think Drupal is the right tool. ;) )

Scripting and database (i.e., PHP/MySQL) are not strengths for me, and I want to create a fairly simple website which is mostly a database interface. The description is as follows...

Content of the database is about seven tables which interrelate heavily. Example: People, Objects, Procedures, Situations. Various People might use various Objects for various Procedures in various Situations. That's a simplified description, since again, there would be at least seven main tables.

End users should be able to search the database for any single parameter or combination of parameters. (e.g., search for X Situation and Y Procedure and find out which People would use which Objects in that case).

The initial search result would be a table of matching results, at which point users could click on one result for a detail display. The detail would show all correlations of that instance to all tables.

So my questions would be:

1. Can Drupal readily do this, or should I be looking elsewhere?
2. What modules would I need to get it done?
3. Is it practical to do this without learning more PHP & SQL first? (I'd like to get it prototyped sooner rather than later)