Converting to Drupal

i am just getting going on a number of drupal projects. very excited and also very green. please add any tips you have for the newly converted. thanks

Hey all... Becoming a drupaller and loving it... dispite the confusion and learning curve! But it's going much better than I thought it might.

I have a domain, the primary one, at www.organicchurch.com (which I haven't had time to work on.)

gocoh.com is a multisite of that install, as is viafide.org and hopefully soon, brainbucket.com

However, brainbucket.com is limping along as a static site (html) and currently in use until I can transfer to drupal.

Hi, my wife Tracy has a website called JacketFlap (www.jacketflap.com), and she's looking for someone to migrate the site over to Drupal. The site's core content is a searchable database of information on children's book publishing, including ~600,000 children's books, ~20,000 publishers, ~1 million + people related to those books such as authors, illustrators and editors. While Tracy updates much of the content herself, users also submit updates to the publisher information, and Tracy approves these before releasing the updates to the site.

For an example of a publisher detail page, take a look at:
http://www.jacketflap.com/pubdetail.asp?pub=5436
(note, you need to be logged in to see some of the contact information on that page)

I also recommend that you look at the site's blog reader:
http://www.jacketflap.com/megablog/index.asp

The site was developed from scratch in ASP / SQL server. Tracy is slowly adding social networking / community features such as user profiles, communities, comments, etc. She also is having someone do a redesign of the interface to make it less cluttered. Before investing too much time writing all this from scratch, it seems like the time to move from a homebrew platform to something with open source developer support and better scalability. A LAMP solution would be great.

If you are interested in working with Tracy to migrate the site to Drupal, please take a look at www.jacketflap.com. Start on the home page, and search for a publisher or a book title so you can see what the search results look like. Then, click on a publisher's name to see a publisher detail page and click on a book to see a book detail page. There will also soon be detail pages for individual authors, illustrators, agents, editors, etc. These are basically profile pages that contain structured fields that need to be editable by the site's administrators, the content owners (e.g. an author), and other users should also have the ability to submit updates that would be approved by either of the above user types (admin, content owner). The pages also will contain related information such as the books an author has written, recent news and blog posts about that author (JacketFlap has its own RSS aggregator), and user comments. Note, none of this is wiki-style content. It's all driven by structured database fields.

I'm contemplating a switch to drupal from phpbb (as I mentioned in "Tricked Out Forums"). I have a critical question before I undertake the phpbb2drupal move.

Does the imported forum match the topic ids and post ids with the drupal nodes and comments?

{this is a re-post from the Post installation forum. It should have been posted in here originally...}

I have a bunch of old html files of newspaper articles which I've stripped the markup out of and turned into a csv file so that I can pull them into Drupal using node_import.

Well... I say I've stripped out the html. Actually, I've left in the <p> and <br> code so that the original paragraphs stay in place, so that we are left with nice readable text.

Unfortunately, what we are left with is something that looks like this:

<p>Alongside lectures and coping with huge increases in alcohol intake, one of the learning experiences facing the 320,000 new students who go to university over the next couple of weeks is independent living. Halls of residence, buying your own place, lodging with a family or renting with friends: which of these is cheapest, easiest and least stressful?<p>Here, four students describe the advantages and disadvantages of the different choices:

etc, etc... (sorry about the ugly code formatting... the only way I could get the p's into the post!)

Now, clearly I can't just add line breaks in the csv file, as this would leave each article flowing over more than one row, making csv import pretty impossible.

Is there any way I can persuade node_import to pay heed to the html tags which I'm leaving in the imported data? I've had a look through the menu options and can't see any way of doing it. If it's not possible, then can anyone suggest some sort of workaround that I could apply using find/replace to the data before I try and import it?

Dear All,
I'm a newbie in drupal and recently I wish to convert a site which will have 3 types of front-end members. All members will have a unique member name,each type of member will have their own profile and registration form, and after they logged in, they can view their own customed contents.
What modules should I use to help building this?
Thank you very much.

With my best,
Jim