Before you start

Hi guys, as some of you may already know I'm creating a sound based site. I found a site that I would very much like to design my sound section and make it similar to what they have. The tagging used can be used through taxonomy it seems they are using the drupal platform but I am not sure.

I most likely need some feedback from experienced users, since this is a fairly tricky thing to do.

The website will have content that is extensible. Take the following example:
Website has profile of user and cars.
Initially the profile stores:

Name
• first name
• last name
• age

Cars
• Brand
• color

For some reason, after a while we would also like to store the wife of the user and info about his pets. So the fields become:

Name
• first name
• last name
• age
• married to

Cars
• Brand
• color

pet
• name
• breed

After a while... and so on.

This thus tends to become fairly complicated as such, with fields being added along the way. Initially I thought that CCK would be very good, since it allows a user with not a lot of tech background to easily create fields and reorganize the whole list as such. However, I believe that when creating fields +100, the performance will go down rapidly. In other words, maybe that's not such a good idea.

Forgive me if this is the wrong forum.

I am in the process of putting a team together to create a new chat network. I have a dedicated server and some pretty good domain names I think. I want to use Drupal for my backend due to its flexible API.

I am a total looser in the fact I know almost no programming or development related skills. I want to use Drupal because of Ubercart, Organic Groups, and the great community support behind it.

I need to know if the drupal forum is good.
I saw that there is vbdrupal. This would have been ideal as drupal is a good cms and vb has good forum platform.
However, there might be issues using 2 kinds. So i want to know if Drupal forum will be good .
the forum is the most important part of my site.
So I just can't have a platform that is so so.

What about the ecommerce thing... the webshop. does drupal have. .is it good?

Please help me with my concerns.
I would like to use drupal if the forum is good and it has a good webshop.

If I make a Drupal site where the content is translated in different languages, will the translations of a content item be available on different URLs?

If the translated content is shown on the same URL as the original content, the search engines will not be able to index the translations which would be a showstopper for me for that feature.

I know that there are modules for making translations available, I'm just not sure about how it treats URLs.

After a couple of purchases from Packt and reading Drupal 6 and Views for Drupal 5, my head is spinning. The views books confused me more than helped me. I was trying to determine was if I could accomplish a particular task as I am unschooled in these matters and am trying to learn. It is my understanding that the foreign key and relational aspects are not supported ine Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 database even though some changes were implemented in Drupal 7 database. During the registration process, two additional fields were completed in the profile, a state name and a zip code. It appears the UID is affiliated with both the comments and the forum posts by users and therefore linked to the state and zip code, except apparently do not have foreign key support. What I would like to do is to be able to display posts from the forum sorted by subject, state or zip code, and a "from date" - "to date" time frame, all to be selected by the viewer. The subject and date are both in the forum table or at least are viewable on the forum. I do not know how to be able to tie the state or zip code of the user to the UID in order to sort the data.