Drupal 8.x

I just started as a web developer for a theatre organization. They had a design firm build them a site and a custom CMS. This situation would be fine if it were 2004, but this thing has just become so unweildy!

They constantly have to update and move content. So - they have a season of shows - and every time a show concludes they have to archive the large amount of content associated with that show and move everything up. The archived show content goes into a "Past Shows" section.

They have a main top nav with two levels of children and a left nav with three levels of children. Right now, everything is done in this propietary CMS. Since it's difficult to code within the CMS, they save a copy of every pages HTML on the server. Whenever they want to edit, they change the HTML file and then paste into the CMS. This company also hosts the site.

Whenever they archive/move files/folders, the CMS changes the link - making tracking difficult indeed. All in all, it seems like just to make simple changes takes 3x longer than it should.

I've worked with custom WordPress themes and I'm assuming for a more complex website Drupal may be an option.

I am fairly new to Drupal. I am building a new site and cannot seem to figure out how to take the "create New Account" out of public view. I have gone through all of the prmissions I can find under people/permissions and, if the item to hide this from the public is there, I cannot find it. I've searched drupal.org on every term I can think of but can only find instructions for doing this with v. 5.x and this seems to have changed in v. 7.x

While my site won't be live for some time to come, I am already getting spammers requesting accounts and I want to stop this immediately.

CiviCon London is taking place at Skills Matter in the centre of the City on the 22nd August 2011 from 9am to 6pm.

CiviCon is the international meeting of CiviCRM users, implementers and developers to share knowledge, experience and to discuss the future of the project.

Building on the success of CiviCon Chicago, this August sees London as the location for a truly British affair that promises to be one of the major Civi events in Europe this year.

Isn't there a new version coming out? My boss Ravee Patel keeps telling me that there is some revolutionary version of drupal coming out.

Fingers Crossed ! What do you think?

Is it possible to make a website with drupal 7 or 8 that has -user profiles, file upload for mp3 files, and have these files visible to other users in a news feed form? what modules would i need?

thanks in advanced

I've read alot about Drupal and it looks like a viable solution for my CMS needs, especially since Drupal has been used by many similar news websites (such as theonion). We are looking to create a news site, where users can login (profiles) and comment.

However, I am not a great programmer. I remember trying to play with Drupal 2 years ago, and I had a VERY touch time. In our case, I am very hesitant about using Drupal because we would need a customized theme. I was hoping I could find a theme that was already setup that allowed us to easily post articles, and allow for users to login ... and then make style and graphic changes to change the look (keeping everything else in place). However, most of the themes in the gallery are rather bland. None look like theonion or any of the top drupal news sites.

So, I was wondering if anyone could point me to some GOOD news website themes. It would be great if certain modules were already included (such as user login), so I don't need to figure out how to get it to work... which is very aggravating for a non programmer. It may be alot to ask (and may be nonexistant), but it never hurts to ask.

Basically, the site needs the following...

User Login & Profiles
Featured articles placed on the homepage (in an appealing way)
Category sections (listing articles in that category)
Articles (and be easy to add new categories)