By msteudel on

Hi All,

I am working on a large site where the end goal is to have it in Drupal. Unforutnetly we have a hard deadline to have the site up so our current plan of attack is to get the entire site working staticly then start to migrate pieces of functionality over to drupal as time allows.

Any thoughts on this process? Do you think it will be easy to incorporate a primarily static site with bits and pieces of drupal functionality?

Where would the majority of the static files live, inside a theme folder, or in the web root.

Thanks, Mark

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

jody lynn’s picture

jody lynn
she/her
Primary language English
commented

What you're describing sounds like a really bad idea. It sounds like you're a Drupal beginner, you're doing a big site, and you're thinking of doing an amateur import on a big rush. This will most likely result in a huge nightmare and instead of leveraging the joy of Drupal you'll be leveraging the nightmare of a crazy hacked-up part-Drupal beast thing. Getting out of a nightmare like that is a lot more time-consuming and expensive than avoiding it from the start.

If you really have no choice but to get the static site up and running first, then do so and then start working on a proper Drupal site in which you import content properly into the database and redo functionality. Launch the Drupal site when it's done and not in a crazy hybridized form. If you don't have a lot of Drupal development experience you're probably going to need an expert on hand. Importing content properly is much more complex than building a site from scratch.

--Zivtech--

feliciag’s picture

feliciag commented

I guess I have a similar question to the original poster. The scope of the site I want to update is smaller, but I would love to create modules within the existing static html site that have full Drupal functionality. Is this something I can do by putting the Drupal elements in an inner folder or is this basically not possible for someone who is new to Drupal and likely to mess it up? Thanks!

msteudel’s picture

msteudel commented

Hi there,

Well I'm knee deep in the process and things are going pretty well. Static content folks are building static content and I'm developing the drupal stuff, pulling things in as needed.

I don't know how familiar you are with theming, but I have found it very key to doing it this way.

Here's what I have done to create a slightly compatible static site/drupal installation.

First off I followed Jennifer Hodgdon's cheat sheet article on starting a drupal site:
http://www.poplarware.com/drupalcheatsheet.html

Then I had the content folks put all the content into the root of the site. (note I didn't overwrite the index.php/or add the index.html page)

Then in my theme I created the following template: page-front.tpl.php, and I stuck my static index page into that template file. Now you have your static site setup.

From there I took the inner template page and started to integrate it with the static content, so I copied the page.tpl.php to page.orig.tpl.php (so I have a backup copy) and then put my inner page html into that page. Then I started to move over the drupal functions from page.orig.tpl.php to the page.tpl.php.

Since the menu isn't yet run by drupal I can control when I want to use drupal or not. So most of the pages are http://mysite.com/static_page.php, but when I have some drupal component ready, I change the menu to point to that, e.g. http://mysite.com/drupal/node. If you want to pull in side bars, then you'll need to look for $side_bar_left and $side_bar_right (or something close to that).

Anyway I'm sure I'm doing all sorts of things wrong, but it seems to be working so far. We're already utilizing the webforms, CCK, Views in our hybrid site.

Good Luck, Mark

peacog’s picture

peacog commented

This is exactly what I'm thinking of doing. I have a static site but would like to start adding CMS features to it such as a blog, local news and events, link exchange management, photo gallery etc. Does anyone else have any suggestions about how to go about this, or whether it's a terrible idea? Perhaps there's another CMS that would be more suited to being "plugged in" to an existing site, like CMS Made Simple for example. Any thoughts?

Peacog Web Development

rlwebweaver’s picture

rlwebweaver commented

I need to migrate a static site and am very interested in the way you modified your template page files. Do you by any chance have some examples you could send to me? The site we want to migrate is:

Http://www.adca.bz

This site was developed in some content management system and then we were asked to remove it and make it into static pages. Now they want it back in content management with the same look and feel and do it quickly to boot.

Thanks,
Rhonda