Before you start

Can Drupal be used to build a shop cart?
Like http://www.ledlightsorient.com/ by zen cart

i'm looking to create a database of people, where i can set certain attributes (male or female, address, phone #, etc.) i would like these 'profiles' to only be viewable by registered members (that i set up myself only.) i guess it would be like an e-commerce store except with people, and instead of descriptions of items, it would be descriptions of these people instead. it would need a search and alphabetize function. i'm thinking either an e-commerce module or a dating site module? any suggestions?

i want to userid and username

Hi,

I'm developing a site using Drupal for a newspaper, and it requires a fairly complex layout. I'm hoping the community can help to validate my proposed solution. The site's content consists primarily of articles, but also has a home page, section homes, category indexes and topic pages.

Home page and section homes: very complex layouts based on a grid system showing 30-40 stories, some with large headlines, some with images, some just text links, all editorially chosen based on importance of story. Something like the BBC News homepage (http://news.bbc.co.uk). Crucially, it must be possible for editors to change the layout of the page to suit the 'news pattern' of the day. For example, on 9/11 we would have wanted to replace our normal 30-40 story layout with a 10-15 story layout to make room for a huge breaking news unit at the top. The same would be true of any one-a-year kind of story like London winning the 2012 olympics, the stock market crash in September, etc. And the editors need to be able to do this without rewriting the template.

Category indexes: Chronological lists of subcategories and articles within the category ("Business news")

Topic pages: Chronological list of articles in the topic, with additional intro text and banner ("The US Election coverage")

I have zero anxiety about my non-CMS websites in regard to data loss. If an HTML page is lost, I just upload it again from my hard drive.

BUT... I have clients that want CMS. I had some of them on a hosted Wordpress installation. (WPMU)... the database corrupted and I lost everything. I did restore the database from backup, but it didn't seem to work correctly.

Here's the obvious question: If I develop a site for a client using Drupal... and lets say they add thousands of posts and other types of data over the next few years. Can I have zero anxiety that I'll ever lose that data? What's the 'slam dunk', very simple method of backup AND restoration?

I had a bad experience with Wordpress... though I'm sure I could have done something differently.

Also, what scares me further is that I believe the WP installation was compromised well previous to the final failure... though not catastrophically... BUT, later on when it did corrupt and fail entirely, I could only restore to the previously semi-corrupt installation. Meaning, I wouldn't know how to start from scratch, resolve my installation issues and restore everything.

OH... and here's the kicker... here's why I couldn't restore all my backed up data... my server would only allow 8mb of data to be uploaded. I heard this can be tweaked via php.ini, but I couldn't figure it out.

I'm looking for the ability to have some sort of sport pickem league.

It needs to:

Rotisserie style, not head-to-head. 1 or more objects will be chosen at a time. Players will predict a certain numerical variable of the object. Then the actual official variable is entered, and people will "score" based on how accurate they were in their prediction.

I'm not seeing any modules that can do this. Has anyone seen anything that can do something like this?