Before you start

I'm not sure how to start so I'll jump right in.

What I'm looking to do if have a blog styled website with multiple authors posting content. I would like to have it divided into different sections with main links such as News, Reviews, Video, etc. and main page which lists the blog posts by most recent, sort of like Drupal does now.

To better visualize

Main Page
- News
- Article
- Article
- Review
- Article
- Article

etc etc.

Hello

I'm running a community website, but i need more features then Joomla can offer now. Can Drupal be a possible solution for my problems/requests? I don't know much about it, so please excuse some of my questions.

Here is what i need so far (sorry for my english, it's not my native language):

Strong users management

Do I need to downgrade to Drupal 5 for current image (modules with the word image in them) modules to run ? Because of incompatibility yet with Drupal 6

I am trying to decide wether to use XAMPP or WAMP as my test site environment what do you prefer and which is the easiest to use and install and works the best with drupal?

Hope someone can recommend one of them since I can't decide which one to use and are new to drupal but not html and php.

One other thing I have been thinking about is the themes that one can choose from, I have found one but would like to make some changes to the theme like colors etc do you do that directly in the panel or can you open the theme css in for example dreamweaver and modify it from there?

We are a Java shop & develop custom web apps for various divisions in our company. I'm strongly considering Drupal as the platform for a new site based on the number of features that we can add out of the box. But we don't yet have a cohesive content strategy across all sites. So while I can standup this site quickly, we may find that we ultimately move away from Drupal to a Java solution like OpenPortal.

We will need to build custom modules. Can we develop Drupal 6.x modules in Java? Will Drupal support Portlets (Apache Pluto, JSR-286 - The Java Portlet API 2.0)?

Okay, I'm installing Apache, MySQL, and phpmyadmin on my computer to do some testing. I have both Apache and mysql installed correctly. I have phpmyadmin installed under C:\Server\Apache2\htdocs\phpmyadmin and have it configured correctly. When I type http://localhost in my browser, it comes up with the "It Works!".