Before you start

Drupal newbie, recent convert from DotNetNuke. There is one thing I miss, though, from the DNN world. In it's pretty straightforward back there to grant "view permission" by role to any content instance (not content type). If I grant a group view permission on a page, set of pages, or even single module then any member not in that role has no knowledge of that content's existence (not by search, nor by entering the URL directly).

I am planning on launching a content site in approximately a month. It will contain a lot of information, tips, reviews, and articles. I hope to someday post on it daily and at times multiple articles daily.
Originally I was planning on going with WordPress for a simple blogging site but now think I may want to look at another solution.
I came across Drupal which seems to have a higher learning curve but also is far more powerful. Is it an out of the box solution? I know it's considered a framework and is there more programming involved?
I plan to have several categories for the type of articles, etc. I will be writing and like to be able to sort them by month, etc. What I like is being able to have a main page where the articles can be posted to daily but also that someone can easily browse by category if they are interested in a specific category. It would be nice if I could make certain articles front page articles. I have used Joomla in the past and it seems to do something like this.

I have been teaching myself web design for about a year and a few months with drupal. I have a pretty strong grasp of the simpler side (no php) of drupal and love it.

I recently got an internship, they want me to build, or at least figure out how to build a second website for them.

The first website they showed me was chunnel.tv. I am tentatively planning to create the first page with a simple flash menu. Each link will be a separate page with news and video presented in a random grid view.

Hi

Would Drupal be able to build a website which has the following features:

Picture/Photo Gallery

Emails

Calendar

Store Favourites

News Page (Add RSS etc to a news page)

But so that each user can create there own photo gallery, calendar etc but still keep it private from another users.

Hi there.

I'd like to use Drupal to manage my user membership in groups and restrict their access to web directories.

Is there a way to secure web directories with Drupal like Apache's .htaccess ?

- Simon

Hello Drupal Forum gurus,
I am totally new to Drupal (as of this morning) and need to know a few answers to what are probably very obvious threads that I've just missed. There are some things that I want my site to do that modules for J1.5 handle pretty well so I am looking to see what the correlations are in Drupal... please note that I am not a developer but am able to conceptualize and hack together some tools now and again though it takes me forever.

Scenario 1: I have an extensive glossary built (over 3000 entries) and want an ajax-like operation throughout the site so that whenever any user mouses over a term, the glossary entry (text, graphics and audio pronunciations) pops up on screen via an ajax pop-up window. It is crucial that no one be able to access the entire glossary (representing over 3 years worth of work) or be able to grab text and other data that is associated with that entry.
Question: Is there a module for Drupal that can handle this? In J1.5 there is a module called Definitions that does this. I hope there is something like it for Drupal.