By techtater on

I am working on taking an older site and making it "web 2.0".

It is for a real estate company and there are several forms for searching homes, calculating mortgages, etc. These forms are all handled by ASP scripts.

How would one go about converting an ASP based site over to Drupal? Can I use a asp to php converter and try to manually integrate these scripts into the site in blocks and pages? Would it make more sense to rewrite from scratch?

And, should I use the 5.x or 6.x branch?

Thank you, I hope I have provided enough information for an answer.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x, Drupal 6.x

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

There are some asp to php converters floating around but i don't see how that gets you to drupal-- you will end up with a custom php script, not a drupal site.

I "converted" an asp.net site to drupal by rebuilding it. If you really want a drupal site, that's you're best bet. Figure out what the site requirements are, go through the available modules making notes about which ones might be useful for your features, then set up a drupal set site and start playing with it. That's what I did and it worked out pretty well.

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

techtater’s picture

techtater commented

I didn't explain very well.

I want drupal for the features it has out of the box. I just need to have a few pages that house these scripts.

Drupal being written in php, I figured it would be easier to incorporate php scripts than asp scripts. As long as I have a page that calculates a mortgage, or searches a database, it will work for me.

I guess I should have asked, "How do I add my own scripts into a drupal page?" and, "Should I go with a version 5 or 6 install?".

**EDIT**

I was just browsing the modules in a default install of 6.4 and I see the module PHP Filter. Reading the description, I think this answers my question about putting code in the page.

I apologize for my ignorance.

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

no worries. And yes, you can add php scripts to pages both in d5 and d6. In d6 the php code filter has been pulled out to a separate module (for more control of enabling/disabling it for security reasons) but the ability exists in both versions.

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

lordbyroniv’s picture

lordbyroniv commented

I have been very impresed

techtater’s picture

techtater commented

@wordfallz I understand now. Thanks for the help
@lordbyroniv It is impressive and intimidating to me

Mind humoring me a little farther?

Ok, I am playing around with drupal now and there is something that is stumping me. I want to have a page that shows blog posts about a certain topic.

For instance, in wordpress, I can assign a post to a category then go to domain.com/?cat=x and get a list of posts in that category.

Is there an easy way in drupal to have something like domain.com/node/x and see a filtered list of blog posts? Do I need to resort to writing a database query?

I thought maybe the views module would be helpful, but its a bit confusing on first glance, and at second glance, didn't seem to do what I needed it to do.

I am sure that this is something that is fairly commonplace, but it is escaping me at the moment. My brain is tired from learning too much today.

Thanks

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

there is a default url (provided by the core taxonomy module) of http://example.com/taxonomy/term/1 where "1" is the id of whatever term you're interested in but the views module is definitely the way to group and present different lists of nodes. It's very flexibly and completely themable.

Check the video collection, I'm pretty sure there's one about views.

Also, though not just about views, the video at http://drupal.org/node/247205 may be helpful.

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz

techtater’s picture

techtater commented

Thank you.

Everything is now working as it should. Using the http://domain.example/taxonomy/# accomplishes what I need. It lists all of the blog posts about a particular category.

I had to compile a list of vocabularies and add the various terms to them and then make links to the appropriate term number.

It works great but it doesn't display exactly the way I'd like it to. I guess with the Views mod I could fine tune it to be precisely the way I want. Playing around with it for a couple of minutes just turned up a couple of error messages (6x version).

Still fooling around with this for now.

Thanks for the help so far.

Chris

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

welcome ;-)

and yep-- views will give you complete control over how those listings appear, it's getting pretty close to an official release.

===
"Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime." -- Lao Tzu
"God helps those who help themselves." -- Benjamin Franklin
"Search is your best friend." -- Worldfallz