modules to look at

crumbs - breadcrumbs for menu or taxonomy models
aegir - multisite on steroids
GAIA - popular content block
GAIA - fckeditor
From Wim Mostrey: Wysiwyg, CKEditor, and Wysiwyg Filter to allow customizations:
"A popular method is using the Wysiwyg module in combination with CKEditor. Enable the module, install the editor library and make sure to allow the img tag in your input format... install the Wysiwyg Filter module which enables a whole range of extra settings for input formats, allowing you to select which attributes, classes and properties should be allowed for which html tags"

Wysiwyg and CCK issues

For High Traffic Pages: Boost

From Drupal.org: Boost provides static page caching for Drupal enabling a very significant performance and scalability boost for sites that receive mostly anonymous traffic. Boost is very easy to install and has been throughly tested on Shared, VPS and Dedicated hosting. Apache is fully supported, with Nginx, Lighttpd and IIS 7 semi-supported. Boost will cache & gzip compress html, xml, ajax, css, & javascript. Boosts cache expiration logic is very advanced; it's fairly simple to have different cache lifetimes for different parts of your site. The built in crawler makes sure expired content is quickly regenerated for fast page loading. For shared hosting this is your best option in terms of improving performance.

Images...

Some great image resources:

http://drupal.org/node/295616#comment-965267 BUEditor + Lightbox + IMCE mods to get positionable images -but only for editors willing to use html.

http://www.lullabot.com/articles/image_and_image_exact_sizes_vs_imagefield_and_imagecacheThe basic node or file dichotomy in dealing with images in Drupal

Vista / Acquia service start problems - work around

There does seem to be a problem starting apache and mysql services from the Acquia panel on Vista machines - seems to happen after the first reboot. See node here for more detail: http://acquia.com/node/361057 . But I did what was recommended - Start, Accessories, Command Prompt, services.msc to bring up the service panel, then start ad_apache and ad_mysql. Worked fine.

Navigation ideas

Using Taxonomy menu for primary menu - this enables our primary menu to grow as we add articles as well as provides a logical topic-driven way for people to look for the technical information they need.

We are using topics for taxonomy thinking that's how people mostly look for information of a technical nature. For instance, for our site documenting Blackboard usage at our university, topics will be "gradebook", "assignments", "announcements", "blogs", "forums" etc. We'll also have to have topics about enrollment, and course requests and other processes we do around Blackboard. Our main services themselves (Request Course, Find Training, Get Help, Check Status) will be links in a block in the right sidebar, then they'll be available from most places. We might have other navigation Blocks that do a more process-oriented flow (Get Started, Add Content, Maintain Course, Grading, Archiving) or something like that... Good navigation is hard! And of course there will be search in case we don't anticipate some keywords appropriately, but I think search is kind of a failure of navigation. It's fine to use, but I'd like to present appropriate articles on a subject, not just see what comes up. We are trying to teach this stuff...

Our Multisite setup

This is the multisite set up we use with "T" managing the server files and "M" managing files from the drupal folder down:

To set up a new site using Drupal’s “Multi-site” capability:

1. T sets up new database (if necessary)
2. T sets up an Apache alias for /foo
3. M adds a block of RewriteCond/RewriteRule to /.htaccess*
4. M adds sites/mainurl.foo folder (e.g. drupal.www.myedu.edu/.../foo)
   
5. M adds settings.php file to the new folder from (4)
6. M notifies T that it’s ready, T kicks Apache to recognize new Alias from (2)

(*) The RewriteCond/RewriteRule block looks like this:

# For: /foo

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^/foo/
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ foo/index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

These all need to be *above* the default RewriteCond/RewriteRule block, which should be the last few lines of the file above :

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !=/favicon.ico
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

Localhost problems

I'm using AcquiaDrupal on my desktop for trying things out. Love how fast it builds up apache, mysql, php and drupal AND drupal modules. Love how easy it is to start / stop, add multisites etc. HOWEVER - it keeps dying on me - cannot start services. Works for a while, then ... nothing. Perhaps I have another service interfering. No skype, what could it be?

I wiped it out, re-downloaded acquia (new version as of yesterday!), and every thing's fine. Have to keep an eye on this.