After giving up on Typo3 and passing on Jooma, I discovered Drupal. So far I am liking what I see very much. I have some questions for the experienced Drupal users on how to set up a news based site. The site will have a monthly “edition” with new articles in 8 or so categories, along with an archive category that has archives of older content from the 8 categories.
I want to hard code a horizontal / graphical image menu at the top of the page with links to each of those monthly categories. I want to rewrite the urls for those categories to something like siteurl.com/business/
When somebody clicks into a category, I want to only show them 2-3 paragraphs of the article (or even just the first page, as I will be using paging for longer articles), then have a box prompting them to log in to view the article or sign up for a free account.
When new articles are posted each month, in business for example, I want to move the previous month’s article into the archive section so that it would appear under the category archives > business > 2006 archives as the “December article”
The home page will have a hard coded (with graphics) menu on the left side as well. When clicking into a content page such as business, I need it to switch to another hard coded menu for that month’s issue, so I need an easy way to swap the left menu depending on what page a person is looking at. I ALSO want to keep that menu’s links in tact when the article is moved to the archive section. So if somebody is browsing a 3 month old article, the left menu for that month will link to the other articles from that month, even though they now all exist in the archives.