By beatybeaty on

I'm curious if anyone has had to use Drupal on a site that also has home-grown PHP web applications?

Specifically, I have a site that has some custom PHP code that will always need to be edited and maintained outside of Drupal. Is there a way to let a web app like this live alongside a Drupal installation?

Also, is there a module that allows for editing pages in an external editor such as BBEdit/Coda/Dreamweaver etc?

Thanks.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

Gunderstorm’s picture

Gunderstorm commented

http://dreamweaverdrupalthemeextension.blogspot.com/

aasarava’s picture

aasarava commented

Can Drupal and a custom PHP app co-exist? Yes -- but just how easy this is to do depends on how much data needs to be shared between the custom application and Drupal.

For instance, if you just want to provide a link from a Drupal-generated page to a page generated by your custom app, that's easy enough. But if you want to pass users seamlessly from Drupal to, say, an outside forums package, you may need to modify the forums package to read the Drupal user table in the database and deal with sessions the same way. (Modules may already exist for this.)

One thing that helps is adding some code to your custom Web app that "boostraps" core Drupal modules when the Web app is run. That way, your custom app can access Drupal global variables, sessions, and core functions as if it were a Drupal module.

Hope that helps,
--A

ligiana’s picture

ligiana commented

Hi,
I'm also new to Drupal and I am supposed to integrate existing applications inside it. This means I should be able to use the Drupal global variables and sessions and also keep my applications 'running' with the site Theme. So I'm looking for a sort of wrapper which allows me to integrate my applications. Since I'm not familiar with Drupal's source code and I have limited time to embedd these applications, does anyone know which is the magic code that "boostraps" core Drupal modules?

thanks,
L.