We've just had our website converted to Drupal by our web developer as we're moving towards providing year group specific info for parents(we currently have a static site with very little other than marketing info), one of the per year group pages will be a letters page which will display any letters for that year group.

Initially the idea was to update each page as and when however thats obviously going to become unworkable pretty quickly especially when putting up a letter to the whole school would mean editing 10 different pages.

I've decided instead to try and use PHP/XML so that all letters get entered into an XML file and then each letters page simply outputs a filtered version of the XML file into a table where the year group matches.

I've managed to cobble togeather the output code so far and have started this morning to try and figure out the code for putting the data into the XML file from a form, I only code when I have to so generally end up butchering code examples to do what I want them to do. So far I've found some music playlist code that looks as though it'll do the trick with a little playing.

I guess my questions are -

1. Am I going about this the right way? does anyone know of a module for Drupal or even Joomla(presuming that most modules have equivelents in both) that'll do this more elegantly?
2. Am I better off doing this with XML or making use of MySQL?
3. Has anyone already done this and feel like sharing their code?

Cheers,

James