By Joseph Biron on

If my site already has header/nav/sidebar of its own, can I use Drupal content just in the content area without redoing all of my site's page architecture?

I have a dynamic site written in PHP + Mysql. It has evolved over a number of years and has many tools and functionality that is not commonly found. Let's call those the special sauce. It also has a prominent home page area where some manually (choke) updated static content appears. The same content area appears on several sub pages as well.

My site design has it's own dynamic header/footer/navbar scheme, and as mentioned links to many specialized tools written in php with a mysql backend.

Obviously I want a CMS to manage the content which is currently hand-written and updated weekly in html. I'm wondering if Drupal is a tool that I can use to "punch in" Drupal-managed content nodes in my existing pages (perhaps via an API or otherwise) without my needed to completely "Drupalfy" my entire site. Absorbing the site into Drupal 100% seems feasible given Drupal's framework approach and open architecture, but that is a very large task.

So short version of the question: if my site already has header/nav/sidebar of its own, can I use Drupal content just in the content area without redoing all of my site's page architecture?

Thanks!

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

My first thought is make a second not public Drupal site. You will use that to manage content. You can then use views to produce rss feeds and display those on your current site.

Joseph Biron’s picture

Joseph Biron commented

thanks. yes that is what I thought a solution could look like. See my next comment...

markhope’s picture

markhope commented

If your current site is so complex would it not be easier to build in a simple content management element to it? It sounds like you only want to use Drupal to make the content creation easier?

The benefit of Drupal is that it is very modular and extensible . Having it as a pure html page creator seems like overkill for a simple job.

I think you'd need to provide more information about how you'd see the current site querying the Drupal site for content. How would www.example.com/yoursite url know to pull in a particular piece of content from /drupalsite/node/1 or whatever? You'd need to reference the node and that would lead to all sorts of maintenance headaches IMO.

The other alternative would be to host Drupal in a directory (you can manage this in the settings.php file) and run the content section there e.g. www.example.com/drupalsite/
You'd need to do some work on theming the header/nav/sidebar but at least that way it would be self contained and your existing php functionality/features could be continued to be used.

Joseph Biron’s picture

Joseph Biron commented

Thanks Mark. Yes, to be sure, my queries here are to help me understand whether Drupal is a good fit or not. It is *not* the case that I'm trying to just muscle Drupal in, so I'm open to other solutions - even if it is "just do it yourself". I'm also looking for more than a simple content editor (like slapping FCKEditor somewhere and dumping html into a mysql column). Ideally there's an admin console with author security, auditing, change history, content publish/unpublish control, home page visibility control. So yes, Drupal is a good fit there from a basic CMS standpoint.

Anyway here's the site: http://www.wanderer.com

It has been cooking along for a good number of years now without a refresh. It's time. The home page content area is actually my php code using MagpieRSS to grab the latest items from the B2evolution blog in the background. if you click on a story, you'll see you end up in b2e (within a directory... /blog), with the left nav repeated - but now b2e "owns" the page.

I want to toss b2e and replace it with a more capable CMS. I can see clearly how the admin view and drupal home page could be pushed down into a folder and the existing home page could pull the drupal feed list via rss (or a view?) - which is just like it is now, except with b2e.

But when someone clicks a feed item link from the home page, they'd be brought to a Drupal-owned page, which would mean the nav system of the site would need to be implemented in Drupal. Right? I suppose I could further wrap those feed links to a page of my own, where my php code gets the full content text and "owns" the page.

So you see it's the whole-page-ownership tidbit that has be the most concerned.

also the current site has it's own user system. I'd have to decide if I'll keep them separate with some SSO, or if the Drupal content even needs auth to do public content viewing.

Any further thoughts you have are greatly appreciated!