By legion80 on

I'm looking into using Drupal for my company, and have a few questions about its capabilities:

1) Is there a web services module that can handle user creation and management?

2) Assume I already have a DB table (in MSSQL2005) that contains a list of shopping stores, with the requisite address information, phone number, home web site, etc., and I wanted to migrate it over to Drupal, where each shopping store has its own page (and I mean that in layman's terms), or node. First off, if I wanted to preserve that information as fields in the MySQL table, do I use CCK to create a new "shopping" node with those fields in it via the web interface? Second, do I need to add them individual through the web interface, or can I just export the table and dump that info into the MySQL table once I've established the node type?

2.5) Along those lines, how easy is it to design the Drupal site backwards? Meaning, if I already have a database schema I want to keep, that I can design nodes in Drupal that uses that database.

3) I would like to create a website that navigates primarily via AJAX (node content loading in a specific < div >, say), with full back-button history. I know that jQuery has a new history plugin that does this via hash mark in the browser address bar. But would this work well for SEO? If I have a website that uses all # to go from one node to the next, would spiders still traverse those links, since the page itself is the same?

Thank you for your assistance.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

jmlavarenne’s picture

jmlavarenne commented

Regarding 2)

You would do as you suggest, with CCK. You can automate the process with a php script.

I just had to do a database migration from another content management system. It's not easy, but it can be done. It took me about 10 hours. I wrote a php script that
- read all the fields from the original database dumped into a text file,
- created each node as an object the same way they are extracted from the db,
- and inserted them into the Drupal database using Drupal's node_save() function. You can get all the Drupal functions accessible to your script by including the boostrap files in your code file.

It requires studying the database architecture. If you have files related to your content, such as images, it is a bit more involved. But well worth the effort :)