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By svref on
I'm switching to Drupal from a raw html-and-ftp website. The site is quite old, and has ~45 html pages of information. Out there on the internet there may be many deep links into our website. I'd like to preserve as much backward compatibility as possible by keeping the content at those URLs static (though I'd like to put them "into" drupal so that others can edit them).
At the same time, I don't want to install drupal in a subdirectory of our website. E.g. www.blah.org is much cleaner than www.blah.org/drupal !
So I want both: install drupal into /, AND preserve my own old arbitrary file hierarchy (50 html files, 20 directories, 0 cgi-bins, 0 images, 20 pdfs).
Can anyone think of a clever way to do this? Or should I just suck it up and break backward compatibility with deep links?
Comments
path
enable the path module (it's in core) and when you create your page just give it the old path/url with the extension.
~silverwing
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MisguidedThoughts | showcaseCMS
It's easy!
One of Drupal's core modules is the path module. It does exactly what you need.
Read this for more info: http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/path.
Looks pretty good! There's
Looks pretty good!
There's the issue where there are multiple ways to access the content under the old system, but I have only one blank to rename it under the new:
www.blah.org/boring-stuff/index.html
www.blah.org/boring-stuff/
www.blah.org/boring-stuff
-->
"boring-stuff" node, and the other names become broken. That's still pretty darn good, since there are only 9 "index.html" files in the site, out of ~50.
DUH, I thought you were
DUH, I thought you were trying to preserve the entire site, but just the URLs (that's why my long winded post below, lol).
Not true. You can add more aliases at admin/build/path. However, you might want to be careful about that if you're care at all about SEO.
If it were me, I wouldn't
If it were me, I wouldn't want to break backward compatibility. While it's not exactly a small task, 50 nodes / 20 files, it isn't terribly huge either. I would probably set up a local drupal site mapped to www.blah.org (using an entry in the local hosts file) and try to use Import HTML to get the bulk of the content into drupal. Put the PDFs in the drupal /files directory, then manually create the links for them in the proper places. After getting everything set up locally, backup the old production site and then bring over drupal (backup local sql db and restore it to production, copy over drupal files).
Another option you could look into is doing redirects through your webserver from the old pages to the new pages.
Yet another option is to just move the production site local, setup drupal on production, and literally copy & paste the HTML for the 50 pages (between the BODY tags) into drupal nodes manually specifying the drupal URL in the node edit form. Not very glamorous, but probably wouldn't take that long.