Decaflon

You are looking at a full CMS system, not a simple blogging engine. I'm sure Drupal has some ability to do something like this, but you are going to need get your hands dirty with code.

Drupal would be my first choice for this job (really the only one in any case for me).

But you are going to have go get wet...

My thinking would be this though...maybe enough to get you started...

First you'd want to build a custom content type for inventory...you'd need the following modules...
Content Construction Kit (CCK)
CCK Imagefield
Thickbox
and Contemplate (to theme your content type)

Then you would setup a category (aka taxonomy), for cars...there's a lot of different ways this could be done, but you'd have something like this...

Cars
-- Buick
-- Subaru
-- Ford
-- Ferrari
-- Yugo

and so on...once you have your terms setup, then assign that to your inventory content type, and away you go...

this has the potential for becoming very complex very quickly though, as no doubt you'll want custom ways to display the inventory and such, and this would get into views (and possibly panels territory).

Using WordPress is not a good start. I'm sure it (and other engines) have a product inventory addon but you'd do much better looking for one that specialised in it from the beginning.

I've done a garage website.

This falls back on a service provided by a car listing website. The employees enter the data through a system already well designed for the purpose (practically idiot-proof) and the system I created pulls the data across into temporary storage.

From there-on it's just a bit of simple php to display everything. But it's everything before that point that you're probably going to have serious problems with if you're not a serious programmer.

I'd suggest you use a third party webapp and do the design for them. It costs more but saves you buckets of time and inevitably makes for a better system for the users.

I should add that using a third party aggregator (we use AutoTrader) means that their cars get national attention and can be found through the third party site. If you block everything up locally, the only way people will find them is by visiting the site directly or you being extremely lucky with Google.

Thanks for all of the suggestions guys. I'm trying to install Drupal now to play around with it but it's not liking something about my web space. I'm sure I'll get it all worked out shortly.

Again, thanks for the help. I'll post a link to the site when I start getting things up and running.

just holler if you have any questions about Drupal, I'll be happy to assist if I can :)

In a strange twist, Drupal actually just released v.6.0 this morning.

Creepy.

Is there any way to install the Drupal software on my machine so that I can just play around and test out some stuff? It won't install on my webspace for whatever reason.

I think it might have something to do with sub-directories or something like that.

Ie: www.example.com/carsite

I think it has to be installed to the actual site.

Ie: www.example.com

I might be crazy though. Who knows.

Have you tried XAMMP (Win/Mac) or MAMP (Mac) to see if it will install locally?

I see no reason why it won't... Then you can play til you turn purple and make the move if you're satisfied.

I'll give XAMMP a shot. Thanks for the help.

I've never tried to install drupal into a sub directory...usually I create a new subdomain/hostname of sorts to test on, then move over to production once done...

not sure if your webhost supports that or not...

yeah, saw the thing on D6, can't wait to check it out, however I'm still using 5...and well, from reading the forum, there are people out there still rolling 4.7 sites...all a matter of preference at this point... Plus, I'm also not sure what the overall percentage of modules that might have been ported to 6 yet...