By Brook on

Hi All - I am just wondering what your opinions are on how long you'd think the development time would be on setting-up a Drupal site when the design is finsihed and static html pages already built and ready to be imported/styled into the CMS.

I know you'll ask what experience I have of Drupal - at the mo, very little. However I have read up on the styling and it seems straightforward enough - you simply create a new tpl to overide the bits you want to change (?).

I would also appreciate your thoughts on how to go about setting up this kind of site:

The site will be similar to a news publication (allowing user comments), but with added social networking for it's members.

It will be a Game related website, so news, articles, features etc will be related to a specific platform (or number of platforms). Also, news will be related to certain games, developers, publishers.

So first thing, should I set each of these things up as vocabularies? (That is one for every game, publisher, developer and platform?)

Is it then possible to go to any of these vocabularies and get all the latest news/features/articles etc relating to them? So they act like a mini-homepage for them? (Is it also possible to allow RSS feeds to each of these?).

Is it also possible to allow comments to be given a thumbs up or thumbs down rating (by other users?).

With regards to the social side to the site, I'd like to allow users to 'rate games' - so can each 'vocab' be rated like that? Can they also indicate they own this game, and it shows up in their profile?

I need them to be able to create groups, so they can form gaming clans etc. Can they post threads in groups? And they act like mini forums?

Friends lists, profile comments, profile pictures - are all these possible? (if so what modules should I use?)

Views and CCK

I understand that views, is used to create layouts for pages easily - however I am familar with the basics of php and mysql, so can probably create the code to use select queries to pull in the data I want and use php and html to lay it out as I want - is this preffered over using the Views module? Or can you use Views in certain parts only (and it's performance issues on relate to those parts - or if you install the module it adds the load to the entire install?).

CCK - is this like extra fields? I guess there is no alternative to this apart from hard-coding your own? (Not something I can do comfortably right now). Is this module efficient?

And...

Is it possible to allow simple BBcode to be used in comments? Eg [b] for bold [i] for italic [u] for underline etc?

Should I go with Drupal 6? I guess it's near going gold - and I would much rather have more efficient code now than later.

The site will probably be an amalgamation of something like Drupal powered observer.com and popsugar.com.

Thank you for reading I and I look forward to your answers. Hopefully the site will be a flagship site for whichever back end it uses, the design is world class, having being worked on by a talented creative team.

Unfortunately they have to put up with me to do the migration! lol.

Thanks for your time.