By adamstorr on

Hi everyonel

I just installed Drupal on my server at www.adamstorr.com/drupal

Everything is working perfectly... I'm familiarizing myself with the Administration area. I have one question: Now that Drupal is installed....how do I connect my current pages in the root directory so I can manage content in Admin? Do I just turn my pages into my own template and add it in "Theme"?

Could someone give me some tips or point me in the right direction with a link?

Any help would be very much appreciated.

Thanks,
Adam

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

gareth_w’s picture

gareth_w commented

If they are bare HTML, then the answer is no.

Drupal is, primarily, a CONTENT MANAGEMENT system. Each "page" on a traditional website is CONTENT to Drupal - each content item is a "node" in the system, and can be of many types (page, stroy, forum post, poll, bug report), which Drupal then manages.

To convert your existing site, you would need to extract the text from each page and put this into Drupal as content nodes. You can add further information around these such as clean URL's and Taxonomies (=keywords) and menu links which Druapl will then use to manage the site.

The template/theme is different - this is the location of the "regions" (header, footer, margins, etc) that make up each page and the graphics and formatting used to deploy these. If you are used to CSS then the template is the equivalent of the CSS for a static HTML site (and in fact still uses CSS to control the page formatting).

Of course, this is just scratching the surface and Drupal can do much more. Play around with your installation and try creating a few articles with the create content option and see what it can do - it takes a bit of playing before some of the contents click (well, it did for me) and don't be afraid of breaking things - if it's a blank site and you trash it just reinstall.

Drupal is a very quick, easy, and powerufl way to give you a web-framework out of the box. You just give it content and it will do all the indexing and menus and logging in and searching and user control and commenting and live rich eiditng of your content and tracking photos and managing your contact details and everything else for you. You'll soon wonder how you lived without it!

adamstorr’s picture

adamstorr commented

Hi gareth_w,

Thanks for the help! My website is built in PHP and I currently use PhpMyAdmin to manage everything. I usually build my own CMS's but decided to try out something pre-built and powerful.

Does this change anything?

adamstorr’s picture

adamstorr commented

QUICK NOTE: I do not want Drupal to handle any of the design of my pages --- which is why I'm hesitant to use theme. I just want to use it for easily adding and editing content to every page.

Thanks for the help!