Before you start

My situation is the following: I wanna be able to setup nice community site, as far as I understand its not very high tech. I need forum like this with moderator features, system to update news and possibility to write reviews of restaurants. I didint think this was very hard thing, but all the design companies I asked from about this told its $2000+ project. I dont really have that kind of money to put on project that im doing for my own fun. So I did some research and it seems like if I wanna create webpage myself I need to go with drupal or joomla.

Basically, I have a goal to create a web-site like kotaku.com and joystiq.com. Both of them are using Movable Type which has some essentials features these types of blogs need: an ability to share the rights with PARTICULAR users to post news, an ability for all users to register before posting comments along with adding avatar and filling custom fields, in other words – user profiles (I think it's called public registration, and I want only users with accounts to be able to post comments). These are 2 very needed feautures. Can Drupal handle that? Maybe some plugins will work?

I have flat HTML / CSS designs for a site. Does having these speed up template creation and save site development time, or would a developer want to do the lot from scratch?

Hi, I'm going to create a website with some db functions as follows:

1. The site is going to be profile driven, so it will be like facebook/myspace (but smaller, as it is for a specific community of people with a common interest). Members will be able to search for other members based on interests, keywords and postcode listed in their profiles.

2. I will be sending out monthly newsletters to the members.

I set up a Drupal 6 website and I would like to create a classified page I only found a classified module for version 5, would it work if I use it for Drupal 6?

I'm a Newbie running Vista that needs a sandbox to play in. After read the MultiSite page (http://drupal.org/node/288126), I was able to install WAMP Server 2, but I get a 404 Error when I type http://localhost/phpmyadmin/ into the IE address bar. I just get a blank page when I try it in Firefox. Any ideas? Same thing happens when I just try to access http://localhost/.