Looking to migrate from PostNuke

Well, another one probably heading towards the Drupal world...

I've been running a car club site on PostNuke for a bit over five years, so I'm very familiar with their way of doing things. PostNuke has upgraded to Zikula, and - whilst it's a good CMS - there's a few of the add-in modules which I've been relying on which don't seem to be alive any more. The pace of development has dropped off, and I'm starting to wonder if the version upgrade is worth it, or if I'd be better pushing my effort into a move to another CMS.

I know you lot are just a bit biased, so you won't disagree when I say that Drupal seems to be the platform of choice.

The basic structure of the site is that unregistered users get access to a lot of the content, but registered users get a little more. If a registered user is one of the c.2500 current paid members of the club (this is a mainly offline club, with real-world events and meetings, and a monthly dead-tree-edition magazine), then they get access to everything - they tell us their username via a form, allowing us to manually tie the two together behind the scenes, with access controlled by physically adding the user to or removing them from a group.

Having a first look around Drupal, I'm seeing that most things I'm doing now have direct equivalents, and migration looks relatively straightforward for most.
- User database - There appears to be a well-trodden migration path.
- Forum - Currently using PNphpBB2, so I can migrate to phpBB3 easily enough, and the integration looks solid. 30,000 posts to migrate.
- Content - Using a discontinued third party module, but I'm quite happy to regenerate the actual content pages.
- News Stories - Core module, and the migration path should sort it.
- User PMs - a third-party extension, but if the users are given warning, I don't think anything's going to be life-or-death.
- Banner ads - not a huge pool, so manual migration's straightforward.
- Events Calendar - migration not important, just need a straightforward calendar with a front page "What's Happening Soon" block.
- Simple form-building - Not worried about migration, but the capacity is important. Looks to be there, but I've not dug properly yet.
- User classified ads - Again, migration not esssential, but the capacity must be there, with admin approval and expiry. Not something I've investigated yet.
- Photo Gallery - Need to migrate from the MediaShare module - several thousand user-uploaded images in personal galleries.

So - we've not found any showstoppers yet, although I've not looked too hard at most categories to start with.

First question, I s'pose, seems to be a timing-related one. I'm really not worried about an immediate roll-out, so waiting a few months wouldn't be a problem. Does that mean I'd be well advised to consider waiting until D7? I've had no joy trying to get the dev package installing over the last day or two, which may be related to the "in-progress" status of the dev package. Is there a reasonably recent milestone release to test?

Then there's one big question which is probably blindingly obvious - modules like those for the calendar and gallery... How do I, umm, actually invoke them from a menu item...? I'm used to just creating a new menu item, then linking it to the module name. Is it that straightforward? If so, what's the syntax? Am I missing something?

Finally, a couple of "nice-to-haves" which have so far eluded me...
- proper granular access control to allow editing of certain sections of content.
- a decent online shop module but allowing offline payment of orders.
- a good way to search a database of magazine issues and articles, some with attached PDFs, some without.
- a geographic address database, allowing users to simply search for a real-world business (search on simple geography plus other criteria) and see other (anonymous to user, ID'd to admin) user-generated comments.

Hosting-wise, this'll all be on a dedicated hosted server, so no real dependency or admin issues to worry about.

I'd be very interested in any thoughts, any comments, and any suggestions on any aspect of that little introduction. Thanks in advance...

Cheers,
Adrian.