Trying to decide whether Drupal meets my requirements

I can't answer all of your points in detail however I have found Drupal to be very flexible and easy to integrate with other systems.

I started using Drupal 2 weeks ago after trying Mambo, Postnuke, Typo3, and one or two others that I can't remember. I am an intermediate PHP and MySQL programmer and chose Drupal because of the ease in which one can add PHP scripts to a page. With the other CMS I tried one had to develop a new module to add any PHP to a page whereas with Drupal you just paste it into a page and specify that page to be PHP.

I had written a basic MySQL members database system which kept track of Family addresses and Family member details but had been stumped with the CMS side of things. I easily integrated my MySQL database into Drupal's database using Drupal's users ID table and my details tables. So I now have a seamless system with a custom build database.

The more I use it and understand how things are done the more I like it. There were a few points that I had trouble understanding but I found extensive searches of the forums unearthed answers.

My site caters for users with limited computer skills and I have been able to customize user input so that it is very simple for them.

As for your points
DEFIANTLY YES for 1,2,3,4,6,9

Points 5,7,8 I am unsure about but I think you would eventually be able to do it with a bit of PHP and MySQL programming.

The more I use Drupal the more confidant I become that it can be used (maybe with modification) for any site and I think if any CMS can do what you want it will be Drupal.

If I was you I would try it.

Regards
gpdinoz

"If we can see further it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants"

Go here to play around with a Demo site.

Username - admin
Password - demo

http://demo.opensourcecms.com/drupal/

gpdinoz

"If we can see further it is because we stand on the shoulders of giants"

1. Ease of use involving minimal manual intervention. What I would like is a system where once someone has posted an article and editors have approved it, it gets published not only to a main 'articles' page but parts of it (e.g. a link to it with the subject in the title) automatically get published wherever we would like these parts to be published.

You never have to manually insert links. If an article is posted, there are many places that it automatically appears. Here is a list of possibilities (you decide which you want to use); front page, category pages (the post can be categorized in many ways), recent posts page, search results. Posting a new post can also cause emails to be sent to subscribers. If the post is a blog, it shows up on that person's blog page. You can also activate or build sidebars that reflect recent posts. Drupal covers your need here 100%.

2. Integration with existing message board and site. I would like a situation where the content management system would sit side by side with an existing vBulletin messageboard we already have so that we can show part of the content on the same page as the messageboard (as I have described above).

This is really easy if you can accept two logins, one for Drupal and one for vBulletin. Otherwise you (or someone you hire) will have to write a small amount of code to replace vBulletins login mechanism with Drupals.

3. Ease of import of previously published articles: I have already mentioned above that we already have some articles published using Blogger. We would not want to lose these, so it would be great if there was a mechanism for importing these articles into the content management system with minimal manual intervention.

This depends on how many articles you have and how they are stored. Are they static HTML files? Your best bet in that case would be to copy/paste them in, unless there are too many. If there are too many there are other tricks, but like I said, it all depends on how they are stored. If they are in a database it is much easier. You can write a script that reads the info from one database, converts it to Drupal's format and insert it into the Drupal database. This isn't a "Drupal thing".... importing your old content will be a challenge for any CMS. You also have the option of simply linking to the old content and letting it exist as it is.

4. Ease of composition: We would like people writing articles not to need to be masters of html to compose articles for submission to our site. Ideally, we would like them to be able to paste their articles directly into the composition window provided by the content manager from a rich text format application like Microsoft Word without losing their formatting. Failing that, it would be nice if the content manager provided a simple markup language that allowed for basic formatting, with the option of html formatting if the article writer wanted to do something really complex.

There are great modules for this, like TinyMCE. It even cleans up the garbage from MS Word when people paste from that. Your users won't need to know HTML.

5. Article rating. We would like people reading the articles to be able to rate them. It would be nice if we could configure the rating system so that we could choose the range of points to be awarded.

There is a nice little module (forgot the name, you'll have to look) that offers 5 stars that users can click to rate articles.

6. Good portal system: We would like to have a front 'portal' page with an index to the latest articles (with a "more articles" link that will direct readers to more articles the main articles page). We would also like to have links to other sections of the website where we would post news, entertainment and other stories.

No problem, Drupal-can-do.

7. Comments and Login Integration with vBulletin. Again, we want to have the ability to integrate with our vBulletin board in such a way that members who are already registered do not need to register again before posting comments to articles. Also, we would like any comments made on an article to become a thread on the vBulletin board.

Ok, you need a major integration effort by an experienced programmer for this. Why not use Drupal's forums?

8. Article Sorting. We would like to be able to specify a sorting order for articles, whether by author, by date or by most popular article (based on rating)

No problem.

9. Login levels. We would like to have different levels of access for different users: for example, we would like there to be authors who can post articles, editors who can edit articles and admins who can create editors.

This is one of Drupal's strengths. You define roles and assign permissions to them.

- Robert Douglass

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