By axcess on

We are about to set up a hosted account at www.midphase.com/hosting_prophase.php to have our html template rebuilt into Drupal.

We also plan on installing a template there we can practice on and add modules to, in order to figure out how to make the CMS function the way we want. But I am confused as to which version of drupal we should use.

I have been reading about php 5.2 not working well with drupal v.6. Some developers have said that version of php is for security, while I find that other functions (I am not well versed in server language - or knowledge) work best with newer versions of PHP.

We publish news online, operating three networks (pages are identical in layout) that comprise local city sites (132 in all). We will need to do a multi-site installation, I am aware of that. But not on the midphase.com hosted account; when the templates are built and we become familiar with the modules we want to use, we will migrated to a dedicated server (using same host) - and there, (re-install) drupal using our templates, modules and configured for multi-site display.

I have not been able to find clear answers as to how we would create headline feeds for third-party sites (not ours). Currently, we offer javascripts of our news categories in which users can chose from three display layouts for each category of news.

I am looking for help (volunteers/paid) to work with us on this project. I have been debating with others about using drupal vs some other CMS; namely joomla because it appears to have a more active user/developer base (I disagree because I find joomla's display format doesn't look like a publication, but more of a blog layout - though there are values within its wysiwyg form and easy admin panel. Still, that is not enough for me to run with it. I want to use drupal, though it is going to be a challenge in developing it the way we want.).

As an independent online news publisher, we have battled with newswires for years; we are not sure if we can survive without help. I would like to communicate with drupal developers that might be interested in working with us and who could advise us on construction and configuration issues.

Due to the competitive nature of online news, I am withholding our parent url for this post, I hope you can appreciate that. Please contact me if this is of interest to you, I will share details with anyone who replies.