Need help figuring out how to transfer my current site to drupal
Hi, I have some experience with CMS but I am new to drupal. I have a site that exists for 10 years and that grew a lot. When I started I had no CMS, every page is dynamic and designed in HTML.
My goal by installing drupal is be able to organize the site content and allow people to submit their own content. Because so far everything has been done by me in HTML, every little update requires me to go into HTML. Also, the site users don't know HTML so every contribution comes to me by email and I have to design the pages. I had enough of it!
These are some of the things I have been wondering about and would very very much appreciate if you could give me some suggestions.
1 - Should I go though the hassle of importing every static page to drupal? Is there a faster way to do it or I basically have to create every page with the editor by copying the text and images?
2 - In most of my pages I use a 2 column structure where I have images and it's description on one side and the main body on the other. How could I accomplish that with drupal?
Here is an example:
http://www.snowbrasil.com/snowbrasil/equipamento/goggles.htm
3 - On the same line of the question above, is there a way to provide users with templates options for when they are adding content? I don't think they will figure out how to wrap text around images, how to use tables, etc.. Is there a way I can give them some options or even one template such as "images on the left, text on the right" or "text block, image block, text block" or " "big image on top, text below" .
You can find my site at http://www.snowbrasil.com
I really appreciate your help.
Thank you so much,
Yan
For the 3rd part you can use CCK and contemplate..
With CCK you can add a content type and design it the way you want to with contemplate.. With that, each time a user adds a content of that type it will be shown the way you wanted it to.. there's a video tutorial on this.. its about cck and stuff.. check this out.. http://www.dudertown.com/files/drupalschool007.mov
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1. investigate the import html.module in the downloads area
2. you would accomplish with the "page" content type , FULL HTML input format, and your HTML
cannot use Import
I can't use import on my server. I checked with my host and they don't offer XSL.
Is there any other option?
Thanks
I've used
I've used http://www.screen-scraper.com/ to scrape content and put into CSV file, then use node_import with custom CCK type.
You'll need to write some custom code to handle images going via node_import. We are doing this at the moment for a client:)
Why not use Import HTML but do it locally, then export the tables?
Regarding question 3, not sure about this idea, there is a module (called a Product) for Plone that offers that kind of feature - a sort of 'choose this layout for your page', I've always toyed with the idea of getting something similar working in Drupal...
You can always use one of the editors such as TinyMCE with one of the image handling modules to support it.