Before you start

I'm trying to determine if Drupal is the direction I should go or not... and am hoping some of you with more drupal experience could help me decide.

Currently I use Joomla for my other website, and I don't necessarily know if that's the best direction for me to go with this one...

Hi all.

I have a client that I am helping re-design a GUI for (from the ground up via a new data model). Their application--a order/inventory tracking system--was written in ASP using MS SQL Server and IIS (Yuck!).

So, I was just wondering if anyone would recommend building such a web-based application on top of Drupal?

The data model itself is the primary concern: I assume I (or someone I hire from this site) would be able to write a data model in PHP that co-existed and interacted with the Drupal APIs.

I recently bought the "Selling Online With Drupal e-Commerce" book from PackT. My purpose it to spend a month or two hacking around with Drupal and eventually roll my own brochure-ware site that may support e-commerce later. The PackT book, even though recently published, is based on Drupal 5 and some of the modules it tells you to use are not yet available for Drupal 6.

So my question is: Is there any compelling reason to prefer version 5 over version 6? The geek in me is steering me towards the "newer" version.

Any suggestions would be very much appreciated.

I am looking into using drupal and want the site to use http-authorization (connected to an active directory) AND i want drupal to read the username supplied to apache and query the domain controller for the information it needs (like email-adress and so forth).

I guess it should be called SSO but I would not like it to be mixed with the queries about only signing on to drupal (and its friends) once, I want the users to sign on to the domain once, and they will be "pre-approved" for drupal, and users who aren't signed on to the domain won't even get past apache.

Hello, due to *very* unfortounate circumstances I'm pretty much forced into developing on a Windows 2003 server. It seems like the only way to preserve the SEO functionality is with this $100 product called ISAPI_Rewrite.

I'm curious how using ISAPI_Rewrite will affect Path and Pathauto modules. SEO is VERY important to the site I'm working on... and it would be a shame to be deprived of url rewriting because I can't use apache on windows (due to Miva Empresa).

I would like to upgrade my site to using Drupal, but I'd like to keep the site the way it is until I'm ready to go. Can I install Drupal at some path other than "/" and then move it when I am ready? If not, how do I do this?