Hi folks. Over the past few months I have been working on becoming knowledgeable with regard to cutting edge inbound marketing techniques. Up until now, I have been doing contract work for a company in the healthcare industry and am looking forward to seeing some improvements in their traffic flow and customer conversion rates. I'll keep you aprised as this goes forward if there is interest.

Anyway, its been awhile since I wrote on this forum, and I am now re-surfacing to put my new inbound marketing knowledge to work in a site of my own. I plan to build something that is sort of social media-like and will require members to enter personal data into a searchable database. I'm thinking I should be careful not to box myself in by using a CMS or free software that will end up being too limiting in the long run, although I admit I don't know if my concerns are unfounded (Joomla and Drupal might be just fine - I have no clue). I thought I should probably steer to Dreamweaver, only because of its flexibility, but have found that you can spend anything from $400 to literally thousands. So here are my questions (sorry for the long post):

1. will Joomla or Drupal support a database?
2. What components of Dreamweaver are 'must have' for what I want to do?

Thanks in advance, Burle.

Hi,

Drupal is a very flexible CMS which you will never grow out of! It is based on a database and you can create and publish any content you like without ever having to program a single line of code.

If you want to get started with Drupal I suggest you should read the book "Using Drupal" from O'Reilly which is contains different "use cases" or recipes on how to create different types of websites using Drupal.

And if you do find that you need some exotic functionality which is not supplied with any of the thousand or so custom modules, you will find that there is a huge community of Drupal developers out there that you can hire (eg. thorugh rent-a-coder or the like).

Hope this helps.