Before you start

I am brand new to building websites, and so far, I find it quite fun! I was using KomPozer to build a very basic site (jillntom.com). My hosting company (bluehost) has a lot of intresting things I could add to my site such as image handelers content managers and whatnot. I installed some image handler and when I tried to install Mambo it complained about it both being installed in the root dir. So I uninstalled the image software in gave mombo a try. I was in way over my head! I found the forums fairly inactive and not much help. So now I am going to give Drupal a try!

I installed Drupal via the Bluehost auto install, and it asked me where to install, I picked the root again. Gave a username and password and I was up and running (and very confused about everything). First, Drupal seemed to take priority over my index.html (jillntom.com) and gave me the Drupal page. I ran into this with mambo too, my main problem is how do I get Drupal to modify my already existing, basic webpage? If I cant get it to do that, then how do I start over (using Drupal) to creat a new page? I have no problem looking at forums to find my answer, but I seem to be stuck a noob mistake/or issue that I cant seem to find an answer for.

Here is my goal;

I am looking for the right technology to build an ecommerce website for custom invitation cards website. The site needs to provide personalization options to allow the buyer to customize the card attributes (ink colors, fonts, wordings, motifs, monograms, etc) prior to placing an order.

I'm sure any shopping cart/technology s/w I select will still require customization, however I'm hoping that using CMS (Drupal) + shopping cart (Ubercart or ecommerce) + moderate customization might help do this faster/cheaper. Alternatively wondering if I am better off building this completely from scratch using .NET, PHP, RoR etc.

Currently my thought process is to break down the work into phases:
Phase I: Core website (including screens up to product selection and product detail). Potentially no shopping cart but maybe just an online Order Form.
Phase II: Product personalization but w/ manual order processing
Phase III: Automated order process using ShoppingCart/Checkout engine
Phase IV: Real-time image rendering (NOT IN SCOPE AT THIS TIME)

Hence main questions I have are:
1) Can Drupal (or any CMS in general) help with my requirements?

hello,
I've been running my site for about a year and the database is getting larger and larger .. there's a lot of table that I don't really know what they are for ..it's a mess!!

I came up with the idea of making a new fresh copy of drupal and installing new fresh modules ... I copied `node` and `user` tables but this didn't give me a real clean result

does anyone out there knows how to copy the users, nodes and comments to a fresh copy of drupal having least problems

plz help ..
Tammamtu

I'll just run this as a scenario -

Let's say I currently have a site based on Drupal 4.0. What steps would I need to take to upgrade to Drupal 6.0?

I run a one-man shop and currently have about 20 clients. In order to build my business, the majority of my time and my core focus should remain on developing new sites for new clients, not revamping old sites.

My understanding is that Drupal is "out with the old, in with the new", with little to no regard for backwards compatibility or transitional processes to newer versions.

I'm hoping that I'm wrong about that - because obviously, if that assumption is true, Drupal would be a very bad choice for me.

It just seems like (possibly based on my ignorance) there's a double-standard here. Everyone says "Don't hack the core - that's bad programming, because you'll have to continue hacking the core..."

But if the development team is essentially "hacking the core" with each new revision, then what's the difference?

Again, I hope to be called out as a complete ignoramus here -

Is there reliable, healthy support for upgrade paths and transitions to newer versions - or is it just "every coder for himself"?

I'm not a coder. I'm a designer.

Hi all

I am new here, and I see Drupal is very cool

But I need something that I don't know if I can have in Drupal!

I need to add a lot of categories and sub categories

Add a lot of articles
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Is this passable?

Thanks

Hi all,
I would like to move a Drupal installation from MySQL 4.0 to MySQL 5.

Is it possible? If yes, how can I import the dump SQL made from 4.0 version?

Thanks in advance,
Giorgio