Before you start

I a looking for a point in the right direction. I have been reading the forum, manuals and watching the videos and all the information is over whelming. I would like to know what others recommend on setting up a site. Here is what I am looking to do.

1. Forums - I would like something similar to a vBulletin look and free.
2. Blog - A blog where users can post.
3. News feeds.
4. Article pages.

Hi! First of all I would like to say I'm not a programmer, so my knowledge about programming is minimal. I've looked on this site for quite a long time. I have a feeling Drupal can help me out but i'm looking for confirmation.

I'm thinking about developing a movie site consisting of several subsites (comedy, action, thriller etc).
The main site as well as the subsites are almost alike regarding content items, ie reviews, ratings, news, trailers, actors database, movie releaselist etc. The main site comprises the total content of all the subsites, so you see all the news/blog items, you see all reviews, etc. While on the comedy subsite you only see comedy-related items. Next step is that users can define which genres they like , so they only see content from those genres.

I'm really curious if Drupal is able to help me out in developing this site. It probably has to do with taxonomy issues but as I already said I'm not really into this.

Other questions I have:

* is it possible to rate a movie within a blog/news item with the same rating as on the rating page (so they add up)? Reason for this is that I would like to use the blog system to directly encourage my users to undertake things on the site, eg rating new movies, or writing a review. But not to send them to the ratings page.

I intend on using Drupal 5.5 which of the two should I install?

Thank you

Hello Forum,

I'm currently evaluating drupal and planning to use it on a (hopefully) large scale community driven web page. With large scale I mean around 75.000.000 Page Views / month. Although there seem to be some large scale sites (this one for example), I find it hard to estimate the performance one gets when reaching as much traffic as i am planning to do. One module (the core module) will be developed from scratch, the other stuff (comments, votes, ratings, personal pages, etc.) probably based on existing modules.

My two questions:

I would like to reproduce Dell's http://ideastorm.com using drupal for our IT customer service center. Is this possible? What modules would I need? Would like to include multiple pictures in post too.

Thanks!!!

I have a site that will need to stay in its current form until Drupal is completely configured. I may be reading the installation instructions wrong but is there a way to install and configure Drupal while preserving your current page?

Thanks
DS