<br>I skimmed this and it sounds entirely do-able with Drupal, but would require some mad Drupal theming skills. Heck, you could probably write a theme that outputs the XML you want though that sounds like more trouble than it's worth. With my limited knowledge of what you're trying to do it sounds like Drupal would be more suited to the problem than many frameworks. The caveat is, of course, when you demand a very specific interaction design requirement (on the back-end as well as front-end), you're always going to do a lot of work. Drupal can help you do that work in a sane and organized way.
<br><br>Scott<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 7/17/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">bryan rasmussen</b> <<a href="mailto:rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com">rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Hi,<br><br>Not sure if this is the right group to ask this in, but it seemed like<br>the other drupal groups were even less relevant:<br><br>a friend of mine recently wanted me to help him do some stuff for his<br>new website. Basically it was clear what he needed was a blogging tool
<br>(he has the content managing needs of a normal blogger and the Website<br>desires of a Fortune 500 CEO)<br>one of the things he wants are very specific design requirements that<br>I do not think is<br>implementable in any blogging tool currently.
<br><br>The display requirements are as follows:<br><br>The first page of the site is a single column menu, pages aside from<br>the initial single column start page can have up to four columns:<br><br>Column types are:<br>
<br>1 - always menu<br>2 - documents of a particular type or a submenu<br>3 - documents of a particular type or a submenu<br>4. documents of a particular type<br><br>so one scenario could be that there are four columns on a single page
<br>consisting of<br><br>| menu | submenu1 | submenu2 | document considered to be under<br>submenu2<br>another scenario could be<br>|menu| submenu1| document<br><br>or<br>|menu | document|<br><br>The content handling requirements are as follows:
<br><br>1. calendar manipulation - add, delete, read events<br>2. Forms to send contact email<br>3. serving of various streaming media<br>4. easy to maintain without needing to be technical<br><br><br><br>after quite a bit of work got the display working in xhtml / css but
<br>now need a way to maintain this. I have the idea<br>that the data of the documents in the non-menu columns could be gotten<br>just by reading in data from some blog installation on the server. I<br>think the best solution would involve a blogging tool that could
<br>output content as just XML and that I could then read to build up the<br>exact display he wants. I figure, given his server restrictions (php,<br>MySQL), that drupal is probably the most likely solution to this.<br><br>
Any suggestions on things to look at with Drupal to maybe do this? If<br>not drupal other tools suggested in the blogging world?<br></blockquote></div><br>