By pdh on

I'm a designer with some (limited) web development experience and skills. I've built a static/table driven site for a client and now they want to have CMS functionality. What's the best way to go about integrating the Drupal CMS with this? I have looked through the Drupal site and seem to get a little lost! Any help would be hugely appreciated. Like I say, I'm a bit of a newbie to this all and some of it is going over my head a little

Comments

joseonate’s picture

joseonate commented

The work towards the development of a site goes through two main branches:
1. the Drupal Development (installing and configuring Drupal)
2. the Theme Development (cutting your graphic design into a Drupal theme)

For the first one you’ll want to define all the functionality that you want for your site, and then install and configure the matching recipe of Drupal modules.

The second one is a bit trickier and requires a fair understanding of HTML+CSS and Drupal theming (PHP snippets and such.)

To learn more about theming:
http://drupal.org/theme-guide/6-7

In my experience, depending on your budget/situation it may make perfect sense to outsource the theme development aspect, as it can be prohibitively complex/time consuming for a newcomer, and the cost of outsourcing it should fall well within your development budget.

Regards,

Jose Onate

Stew-bee’s picture

Stew-bee commented

This doc page http://drupal.org/node/313510 and the link to the Acquia webinar on it, might help you determine if you want to take on this project. The webinar is about 90 min and goes through a conversion of a non CMS site into Drupal.