title: Is drupal appropriate for my web application?
body: <p>First a little context for my question. Although I am not new to programming (I have a first class degree in Computer Science) I have been out of it for over ten years. To update myself on the current workflows I am building some distinct systems in different environments (currently looking at LAMPS and Ruby on Rails). </p>
  
  <p>I am building an admin site for my brother's property management company. The design seems pretty straight forward. </p>
  
  <p>I need a database with tables to store:</p>
  
  <p>Estates.
  Each estate has a number or properties (flats or houses).
  Each property has a number of charges (service charge, water bills, maintenance ect.) </p>
  
  <p>Then I have:
  Owners.
  Each Owner must have ONE or MORE properties. 
  Owners make payments.
  Each payment is allocated to ONE or MORE charges. </p>
  
  <p>This is the basic idea, with functionality built on top. Intuitively these tables should be created in, say, mySQL and then CRUD functionality coded in php with html forms. </p>
  
  <p>I feel up to the challenge of web development. I can build a nice little app for my brother to replace his HORRENDOUS spreadsheet :) What I am not is a web DESIGNER. So I thought I would turn to drupal to add bells and whistles, thinking it would let me build a database and put nice looking forms in front of it. </p>
  
  <p>As far as I can see, I don't interact with the mySQL database. I know I can, but the idea in drupal is that the structure above would be designed as content types, not tables, and the interaction is done through views of nodes created through 'create content' forms. As I understand it, content types will store each FIELD in the content type (represented my tables above) as a different table in the database. So I go from a quite simple design to a huge relational structure with a lot of joins. </p>
  
  <p>Looking about on the drupal.org site I also see that building the relations between the content types is not a core function and seems to be implemented by the developer. This means I would be working hard to replicate functionality that comes with the mySQL database server, which seems strange as the nodes are stored using mySQL. </p>
  
  <p>What I gain is the interface design. User login and authentication, web interface, themes ect. Also, in doing this I will learn a bit about drupal and so will have it as an available solution in the future. </p>
  
  <p>My question then is this (at last I hear you cry!). Am I misunderstanding the drupal methodology? Is the system I am using as a case study too simple to benefit from a CMS/CMF? In other words should I just build it using LAMPS and find another framework for making the interface pretty and handling login/authentication and security (and if so do you have any suggestions?) </p>
  
  <p>I would appreciate your opinions. Thanks in advance. </p>