Q:

Drupal Or not to Drupal?

I'm creating a diving community, but I don't know if I should use Drupal or to create my community all on myself in PHP. I've never used Drupal and so I don't know how to create a theme. I have a design already. I also need a forum.
Any ideas?
Kind Regards

A:

Drupal is great for community websites - but its a steep learning curve.  If you know enough PHP to create your own site then you should be fine to get started with Drupal though.  Why not install it and have a bit of a play?
Forums in Drupal are a bit average, but PHPBB integrates pretty well, and there are contributed modules out there to ease the integration somewhat.
Theming is a non-trivial task as well - but there are heaps of online tutorials like this one: http://www.lullabot.com/videos/advanced-theming-drupal-7 which explain a lot of the technical stuff.  If you want to jump in, just start looking at the Bartik theme that comes with D7 out of the box.  Again, dependent on your experience you should follow much of the broader idea of whats happening by following the code.
I'd also recommend (if you like to read paper rather than screens) pro drupal development (there is a Drupal 6 version, and a current Drupal 7 version as well).  This book explains everything to a very fine detail and my copy is well and truly dog-eared from use.
Hope that helps in some way
Cheers
Steve

