Hi all. I'm a complete newbie, so please forgive me if this line of questioning sounds daft.

I work for a small charity which is likely to have its new website managed through Drupal.

But my job is to set up a database to manage a wide range of new support information for the patients that we serve. Stuff on the kind of tumour that they have, how it can be treated, side effects, etc.

The database will need to record a large amount of information, such as: who the information is for, what the subject is about, blocks of text and tables, hi- and lo-res images and other rich content (possibly vid clips or sound files), details of authors, editors and approvers, long-term tracking on who signs off, what changes to text were made when, when the next content revision is due, etc.

So my questions are:

1. Could we use Drupal as our database for all this information?

2. Could we do it alone or would it require a lot of expertise from existing Drupal programmers to design and implement the database infrastructure?

The benefits I would hope for are:

1. Avoid having to identify a separate MySQL Opensource database to manage our information on;

2. Put our info straight online through Drupal and keep it updated, once our new website design is ready;

3. Keep our very tight budgets under control;

4. Have a suit of data that is flexible and readily-adapted to other purposes (e.g. import into InDesign layouts for PDFs and printing).

Any views on this would be warmly welcomed. I'm trying to think out of the box for my charity but, as you know, it's often darker outside the box than in it!

Best wishes,

Trevor