Converting to Drupal

My buddy wrote a club directory site in Joomla which I hate for a number of reasons, so he agreed to let me re-write the site in Drupal. I'm having trouble finding a combination of modules that will let me emulate the functionality of the directory and directory search.

Directory example can be found at
http://life.mn/index.php?option=com_sobi2&Itemid=29

I installed drupal 4.7 thru the control panel on powweb.com (my web hosting I rented). It automatically installed in my root folder. Now I need to know do I need to instaled Drupal on my own computer. I use ftp thru Dreamweaver to access and change files. I want to update and add modules to my site but I do not know how. I download modules to my computer from Drupal site but I'm still not sure what to do with them. I know it has something to do with uploading the mods to the server in the right folder. I see mods but it doesn't look like they would go there.

I am converting a site from a "roll your own" asp site so I've lots of 301 re-writes to do have found some help on that - but I may be back ;)

first though I have an existing subdirectory /demos/

the content and pages within that existing subdirectory are to remain intact - as in it's not getting put into Drupal that's working fine so far, (drupal is bypassing index.php if the directory exists?)

Hello,

I am running my forums on Drupal:
http://www.opentravelinfo.com/forum
and I am actually quite o.k. with the features offered. I especially love the clean url structure that is built in.

I just saw a forum site for sale, that I was thinking about buying. It runs on vB and I was wondering how hard it is to integrate this into my site (I would redirect the posts to the appropriate posts on my site after conversion).

Hello from a Drupal newbie. I will be overhauling at least a portion of this site and I am thinking Drupal will be excellent for it: http://www.rmanyc.org/home.cfm .

Each of the sections (Collections, Exhibitions, Programs, etc) has its own banner and left-side secondary navigation. Since each section would have its own banner, would the Drupal model be suppress the site name and then apply a block with the Education banner to all the Education pages, a Collections banner to all the Collections pages, etc?

Hi all.

I have a very large DB with content, like
AUTHOR, BOOK, TEXT

I'm look for a migration script or a module where I can import my DB to Drupal in a "directory" way (list authors => author's books => texts of the book => text).

Is there a module that can do it?

Thanks a lot