By balforth on

I am really looking for software to provide blog integration into an existing site. I don't want the software to generate a full, canned page where I just modify the theme/look/feel. I want to take my existing web page, with my existing header and footer and CSS, and have blog entries appear in the body.

I don't want my site to be a blog. I just want to have a blog in my site. Is this easily accomplished with Drupal? Is an entire CMS overkill for my requirements?

Thanks!

Comments

dnewkerk’s picture

dnewkerk commented

If "all" you want is a blog, then you might be better off with Wordpress. Drupal can certainly be used for blogging, but is a bit more complex due to the available power and possibilities. Most people tend to feel Wordpress is usually best at doing its own core task of "blogging", if that's the limit of what you want to do. If you think you might expand the features in the future though, it may be wise to go with Drupal in the first place.

Since you didn't quite specify, I'm going to assume you want your blog on a sub-page of the site, not the home page... doing this is easier in your case (if you want to add blog content to your non-CMS home page though, you could do that by making use of your own blog's RSS feed or probably various other methods as well). To accomplish what you're looking for, my suggestion would be to install Wordpress (or Drupal if you want) in a sub-directory (e.g. /blog). If you instead install a CMS in the root directory of your site though it will "fight" with your other non-CMS paths on your current site and you'd need to customize the .htaccess mod_rewrite rules to ensure your old paths continue working. You can then copy and paste your header and footer HTML into the Wordpress (or Drupal) theme, surrounding the dynamic portion where the content/blog will appear. I'm not sure what file that is with Wordpress - with Drupal it would be page.tpl.php. If you are already including the header and footer as separate files in your current site (e.g. with simple PHP includes) then that is even better, as you can include them in the Wordpress or Drupal theme too, making only a single copy of your HTML to have to worry about. In either case of Wordpress or Drupal you will likely be best off to use either a completely custom theme from scratch or a base theme (in Drupal one such as Zen or Hunchbaque) so you have less pre-existing theme stuff to interfere with your own layout.

Hope this helps!

-- David
absolutecross.com
[new guide/lesson in progress: Creating a CCK and Views powered Drupal site - feedback welcome]

balforth’s picture

balforth commented

Thank you very much for your detailed response! I think I am going to give Drupal a shot first. I'd at least like to play with running a CMS based site. Based on your response I downloaded Apache/PHP (well, actually XAMPP) last night.

I am currently using includes for my header and footer, however, I am a Java developer by profession, so I have been creating my sites in JSP. I'm used to it and it's comfortable for me. Since I've been looking at blog software/CMS, I've pretty much surrendered to using a PHP-based solution. Is it possible to have Drupal content in a JSP page? Or am I limited to using PHP?

Also, I intend to have several commercial, unrelated sites/domains hosted on the same server. Will a single instance of Drupal allow me to manage all of these, or will I have to install it for each domain?

Thanks again :)