Post installation

I want to create a site dashboard which will have a single login page which will give a summary of mail recent site posts as well as log the user into roundcube mail and drupal. I haven't started the project yet but was wondering if anyone has done something similar and would have any idea of how to start.
Thanks in advance,
Ben McRedmond.

I am new to Drupal. I'm extremely impressed with the software and the community. I just have one hurdle I can't seem to find an answer for.

I would like to be able to post private information for each user that only they can see. For a law office, a client would log in and they would be able to view/download files that show the state of their case(s) and also see billing summaries (amount of money owed or held in trust). This information is confidential so it would need to be secure. It would be nice if I could add a few menu items under "my account" to take users to private nodes of different types.

So far I've only seen access permissions assigned by group and user level permissions seem like they are needed in a situation like this. With tac_lite I believe I could create a group per user which seems like it would solve the problem... this work around seems confusing and it could cause problems.

I've thought about trying to expand the "my account" section of drupal but haven't found enough information to experiment yet.

I've installed filemanager but haven't finished exploring the permissions system there either.

Anyway, I think there are ways of achieving this but it doesn't seem like a common need and I can't figure out an obvious solution. I was just hoping a post might lead me to someone who has achieved a similar goal or could push me in the right direction.

I'm trying to use the views module to make a replacement for the main forum page.

My first impressions are 'v.cool module!' it might have simplified a few part of my site had I come across it earlier but hey ho, it should save me some time in the future...

Anyhow...

It has been simplicity itself to create a list of the topics in the forum, display the user and date in a list how I want it however...

Underneath each topic I need to display an 'unrolled' list of all the replies to that topic.

I am using the relatedlinks module to display a dynamic menu based on vocabulary and terms.

"Out of the box", relatedlinks.module displays the listing in an apparently random order. I would like to display the list in alphabetical order. I looked at the code, but didn't say where to change the order.

Has anyone done this?

I have the time zone settings correctly configured sitewide and for the admin user, but when I enable js calendar and try to create an event, it shows the wrong time.

Is there any way to correct this?

Due to bugs in the category_pathauto module (which means I can't have aliases), I am trying to get a custom menu block to display right down to the node view. Since both containers and categories are nodes and the entire hierarchy consists of different node ids, I am unable to get the menu block to show right through the hierarchy unless I enter all the node ids of the entire hierarchy, plus that of the newly created node in the menu's block visibility settings. As you can imagine, this is next to impossible.