Hi,
Firstly, the site I built using drupal: Cue Online
I am a lecturer in New Media at Rhodes University, in South Africa. Every year in Grahamstown (the town where Rhodes is situated) hosts a National Arts Festival for 10 days. The Festival is a vibrant 10 days, with thousands of people flocking to the small town to engage with some of the finest theatre, dance, art and culture the country has to offer. The department of Journalism (which houses the New Media Lab) uses the festival to provide a live training exercise for students of Journalism, in the form of a daily print publication which keeps pace of the happenings of the festival, reviewing plays etc. This year we hosted students from multiple institutions in South Africa, and some students and staff from Utrecht University. Each year the different disciplines in the department do their own thing (Print/Design/Writing covers it in the daily paper, Radio produces inserts for a national broadcaster, and TV produces inserts for multiple parties). This year the New Media Lab brings them all together in the form of an online portal that carries text from the print edition, video from the TV section (in addition to our own students work), and Audio in the form of podcasts from the Radio section. New media students also engage in their own material creation to supplement existing stories, or build stories from scratch.
The entire site has been built using a "Vanilla" installation of Drupal, in that no modifications have been made to any modules, and no custom modules have been written, it is simply an implementation of the right modules. The biggest stars go to: Views, CCK (esp. the node reference module), Contemplate, Admin menu, Path and Path Auto, and the Audio module. I have heavily modified the amadou theme (building it so I can have a two/three column/mixed layout, and ordering the sidebars/content so that content appears first on lower end browsers like opera mini). The site looks reasonable on Firefox, Safari/Konquerer, and Internet Explorer 6/7, with one stylesheet, and a very small exception file for IE. I have also used/managed the site using Opera Mini from my Cellular phone. Development turn around time was around three weeks.
We are hosting our video content on a third party website to lower the complexity/load of the site, and to get some linklove from their site.
It was amazing to dig deep into drupal and pull a rabbit out the hat. We have a very comprehensive site, which showcases the work our students are producing, along with the power and flexibility of drupal. It is by no means perfect, and it has made me think seriously about what feature requests I am going to send towards drupal 6. The CMS is a pleasure to work with, and very much customised to our needs, adding page prefixes like style guides was a blip on the radar (I used a block at content top, restricted to when users submit an article), making listings of content was simple, reformatting related nodes into blocks running next to the articles was a piece of pie, where views did not fit the job exactly it took only a few lines in a block to prefix a view with the appropriate php. I think it is awesome that I could set up the infrastructure for the project in such a short space of time, which included both functional elements, and templating (although every day there is a new addition to the template while the festival runs ;) as a one man team!
It was trivially simple to provide space for podcasts, video, and images, as well as pdf's of the print edition, which link bi-directionally to articles that have been repurposed for the web.
My favourite content pieces so far are a story about a local saxophonist because it links a podcast (in the sidebar) to enrich an already interesting story.
The only place I found I needed to do some footwork was to provide a weather stream for Grahamstown. In the end I wrote a small python script (my favourite language on earth) to parse the RSS feed from wunderground.com and output a static html file which is included as a block when the cue page renders.
Hourly cronjobs ensure the site index is easily searchable, and has already produced a few results which I quickly related together (related articles, podcasts and videos which I did not realise were already in the system).
Basically Drupal is awesome (but then this is the choir, isn't it?)