Changing Website from HTML to Drupal

Automatically the domain is directed to index.html or .htm, so dont worry if you put index.php (Drupal software) in public_html.

You can also make a folder `online' or something for your Drupal installation, and REDIRECT it later on.

Basically you will either delete index.htm/html and automatically your domain is rendered by index.php, OR you can use Redirection from your domain control panel to specify

http://yourdomain.com/ to http://yourdomain.com/index.php or http://yourdomain.com/online/index.php

Use IMPORT_HTML or NODE_IMPORT that works for Drupal 4.7.x that will nicely do the job for you

Once you are satisfied with Drupal, you can proceed to announce it or redirect it so that visitors can join the site (if Drupal user registration is enabled)

*Are you using 4.6.x?

Hi kisig,

Consider using drupal 4.7.x and the import module to do the job.

I think the drupal 4.6.x version is about to be less updated because of the new drupal 5 beta version.

Use the Import HTML module
http://drupal.org/project/import_html

Import module for 4.7.x
http://drupal.org/node/96024
Import module for 4.6.x
http://drupal.org/node/96022

But the import module requires

* XML/XSLT support on the server. Check your php_info(), if it says either XSL or XSLT anywhere, it's fine.

and

* HTMLTidy - Either with the PHP module or the commandline version.
Update: there is now an automatic installer for HTMLTidy bundled in for Linux hosts.

You can easily install Drupal in a subdirectory like e.g.

yoursite.com/drupal/

while you import the HTML pages and keep the existing HTML pages

When the the importing is done, you can then switch the drupal installation to the base url.

The file for doing this thing is called the settings.php in the subdirectory located in \sites\default on your harddisk or /sites/default on the server.

look for the $base_url and change it to your subdirectory

$base_url = 'http://www.yoursite.com/drupal';
When you have finished and copied or moved the drupal files to the root on your server the $base_url in settings.php should be:
$base_url = 'http://www.yoursite.com'; // NO trailing slash!

You can edit the file with notepad if you are on windows.