By jdesrig on
I have a potential client who wants me to create a drupal site for him. He already has owns a domain which is being used. Can I make use of that too, or will drupal somehow interfere with his site? If there are issues with doing this, how could I make it not interfere?
Comments
The best thing is to put
The best thing is to put Drupal either in a folder or on a subdomain.
e.g. www.example.com/drupal or drupal.example.com.
Anyway it is unprofessional (=risky) not to run every change and update on a test site, and the dev site or staging site should probably be on the same server: so probably long-term you will be running a second copy of the Drupal site at test.example.com or dev.example.com. (You may want to make your dev.example.com or test.example.com a staging site and do dev on your laptop, as Drupal can be frustratingly slow to work on unless the server is well set up.) So why not just set up your dev site or staging site at dev.example.com now from the start, be careful that Google does not index it (!), and when it is ready to go live just move it to www.example.com. This would be a pretty normal workflow for a small client with a single developer. I do it all the time, even for Wordpress there will be test site at (for example) dev.etc.com and a live site at www.etc.com even though Wordpress is way simpler and less likely to break during an update than Drupal in my experience.
You will have problems trying to run Drupal and a different system in the same document root. It should be possible if you have the appetite to adjust Drupal's .htaccess to get it working, but modifying .htaccess files can be rather tricky to get right.
Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors