Upon research and suggestions from friends I have decided to use drupal as the possibilities seem endless... even though I have no experience with it. The installation is complete and now I need to start building the site. I need drupal to allow me to post articles, etc. However I also need to figure out how to pull data from financial websites and calculate it into averages, etc and maybe even graphs. I am building a financial analysis website, so there will be a bunch of pages specific to market/product/company and then the numbers and/or graphs. Do you know of a module that would make this as easy as possible? Some other minor things like shopping cart/membership that will limit what pages people can see depending on their membership class. I would like to eventually have a chatbox where members can write to each other on the side panel, but I can do that with time. Right now I would like to build the homepage or dashboard that both visitors and members would see when they visit the site. Does anyone have a suggestion on what would be best for me? Basically I need menus, pages with content (i.e. text, graphs, numbers), news articles, user defined favorites, etc. Additionally, does anyone know anything about pulling data from other websites? We are going to pay for the data from another company and I have a guy who will write a script to have the data calculated and pushed onto my pages. Does it have to be this complicated though? I have absolutely NO experience with that part and really could use some guidance there. I am willing to spend some money on coding if that is required, but would like to find modules that are user-friendly enough for me to manage and understand. Thanks for your help!!!
You can use "Feeds" module to get the data as nodes into your drupal site. Its easy to write extensions for the module. Use CCK and Views to have displayed in any way you want. There is also views_calc and views_charts module that you can use to calculate and graph... If you have so many questions, its better to hire a drupal developer.
anyone have a good suggestion for a drupal shopping cart add on? I've seen ecommerce plugin but im not impressed..