[development] use drupal as a backend?

[bryan rasmussen]

Hi,

Not sure if this is the right group to ask this in, but it seemed like
the other drupal groups were even less relevant:

a friend of mine recently wanted me to help him do some stuff for his
new website. Basically it was clear what he needed was a blogging tool
(he has the content managing needs of a normal blogger and the Website
desires of a Fortune 500 CEO)
one of the things he wants are very specific design requirements that
I do not think is
implementable in any blogging tool currently.

The display requirements are as follows:

The first page of the site is a single column menu, pages aside from
the initial single column start page can have up to four columns:

Column types are:

1 - always menu
2 - documents of a particular type or a submenu
3 - documents of a particular type or a submenu
4. documents of a particular type

so one scenario could be that there are four columns on a single page
consisting of

| menu  | submenu1 | submenu2 | document considered to be under
submenu2
another scenario could be
|menu| submenu1| document

or
|menu | document|

The content handling requirements are as follows:

1. calendar manipulation - add, delete, read events
2. Forms to send contact email
3. serving of various streaming media
4. easy to maintain without needing to be technical



after quite a bit of work got the display working in xhtml / css but
now need a way to maintain this. I have the idea
that the data of the documents in the non-menu columns could be gotten
just by reading in data from some blog installation on the server. I
think the best solution would involve a blogging tool that could
output content as just XML and that I could then read to build up the
exact display he wants. I figure, given his server restrictions (php,
MySQL), that drupal is probably the most likely solution to this.

Any suggestions on things to look at with Drupal to maybe do this? If
not drupal other tools suggested in the blogging world?