Before you start

Have run with Joomla for more than 4 years, but getting more interested in Drupal, but have recently migrated to Joomla 1.5 from J 1.013 and have a newspaper site with about 2000 articles. My skills in php and Mysql are limited, but i can manage them, when instructions are not in too tech. jargon.
Any links or advice?
What are my chances?
Any success stories?
Appreciate any ideas!

I'm designing a web site for a medical association, with a very typical structure: news, articles, book catalog,...
Because of the so typical structure, I'm thinking that using drupal can dramatically reduce the developement time even if I'm new to it.
My problem is that the graphic designer I work with is only using Dremaweaver, and he is not into programming at all, so If I decide to use drupal, I will have to create a theme that looks like the plain html files that he makes as a guide, and I can tell you he's very meticulous about layout details.

I'm new to Drupal and the CMS world - looking for the ability to manage multiple sites with one admin panel/hosting account. Can Drupal do this? I'm looking to build a group of community sites. Drupal has lots of the features and modules I'm looking for - but the ability to manage them all from one admin panel is really key. Thanks!

I have drupal 6.1,after uploading it too my host ,it runs really slow like my internet connection is bad,its not I get about 300kbps
I've been on three different computers all have high speed internet and its seems like I using dial up ,any help would be great
or if you know a link that would help let me know.Any questions I could answer for you let me know.
thanx

I'm interested in setting up a website where people can register an account, and post snippets of code that others can learn from, and then others can view the code, rate the code (out of 5 stars), and leave comments on the code.

Would Drupal be a good solution to make this, and if so, how would I get started?

Thanks in advance.

Ok, I'm at my wits end trying to figure out what the right way to go is. Maybe you do.

Around 6-8 months ago, I had a coder start work on a PHP/MySQL backend project. The project was to basically construct a backend that would be accessed by clients via a common central admin panel (housed on one domain). All the sites would then share a common set of features (edit text, add pictures, podcasting, photo galleries, etc).

The problem is, that coder created a few modules - then fell off the face of the planet - leaving the project stalled. That was over 6-8 months ago. Later, I realized what he set up was all XML based, not MySQL based, like what was originally planned. Not saying that's bad, just wasn't what was asked for. But, he certainly took his money no question.