Before you start

Hi All,

This is the first time I'm checking out Drupal. I have a small team of Joomla Developers and a few core PHP programmers. Joomla sites tend to be rather slow and heavy. After reading a few posts about Drupal, I wonder if we should move towards Drupal development. Need your views on a new website we need to build and if Drupal is the right choice for it.

1. Banner management system (Clicks, Impressions and duration based) - Joomla has an extension for this
2. Multilingual support (Chinese, Arabic etc) - Joomla has Joomfish
3. Newsletter Management System - Have a few good extensions in Joomla for this.
4. Roles based content Management - Joomla has limited flexibility here.
5. Need to integrate with Vtiger - Joomla does have a bridge for this but we might need to write custom code anyway. Does Drupal have any extension/add-on to do this?
6. Part of the System is done in Zend Framework, so we need a SSO (Single Sign-on) facility from Drupal to Zend Framework portion. Is it possible?
7. Is it easier/harder to write your custom code in Drupal (Compared to Joomla)
8. Design is of great importance. Is it easy to fit custom design templates/themes in Drupal. I don't see too many good-looking themes in Drupal. What are the challenges?
9. AJAX support - Joomla gives native mootools suuport. Is it easy to use Jquery/YUI with Drupal?

I was just wondering if the following site structure would be possible in Drupal:

The structure would be similar in complexity to a light version of Gamespot where the majority of the content such as Article Type (i.e. News, Reviews, Screenshots) are organized/categorized under Consoles (i.e. Xbox, PS3, Wii) and also associated with Games (i.e. Halo). Also, some Article Types such as news can be associated with zero or many Consoles and Games.

I have a DRUPAL 6.14 “development” site running on a Windows XP SP 3.0 machine that used to work fine with XAMPP version 1.6.8.
I just upgraded XAMPP to 1.7.2. PROBLEMS: Now getting a lot of errors like:
“warning: Attempt to modify property of non-object in C:\site location\somephpfile.inc”
The error occurs repeatedly, as in hundreds of times. Not all modules, but lots of them.
Also, now get:
“warning: Parameter 2 to xxxxxform() expected to be a reference, value given in c:\site location\somephpfile.inc”
It looks like PHP 5.3 may work a bit differently from its ancestors (not sure which version was bundled in XAMPP 1.6.8.)
After installing XAMPP 1.7.2 and Drupal 6.14, I ran update.php, which obviously does some things to the database.
After trying to run the new setup and getting tons of errors, I tried rolling back to a couple of older versions of XAMPP, but in each case, MySQL did not seem to want to work correctly (like it wouldn’t even start.) VERY SCARY. CONCLUSION: update.php had changed my database into a later version of MySQL (or something, not sure.) I had backups of everything so no worries. XAMPP 1.7.2 comes with MySQL server 5.139.
I found a few discussions on similar problems, but most of them required fixing code inside the various modules. I had too many offending modules. Also, I did not want to “hack” them.

I’m looking at creating a (sort of) directory site. I need users to be able to register with my site, and then have the ability to publish items into a directory. These items will need to be able to include images and maps integration, as well as other imformation.

This will need to be inputed via a front end web form, for which I can then approve from the admin side and have published into the directory.

I need to build a video training website that is subscription based.
Very similar to www.Lynda.com ...
Need your suggestions.

- Selling Subscriptions: Ubercart ?
- Displaying Screencasts: ??
- Anything else?

I'm wondering if it is possible to use the same Ubercart/ecommerce installation and product database to display the same set of products on 3 or 4 different domains.