I have an existing website design, xona.com/new, that I wish to convert into Drupal. Is there existing information that shows me how to do precisely that?
The website will be nothing more than articles with screenshots. No commenting, no logins, no sessions IDs in the URLs, no fancy URLs. I want my URLs to remain simple, such as xona.com/pong or xona.com/breakout, for examples. (Not having simple URLs is a deal breaker for me, but I have been informed it is possible with Drupal.)
Your opinion... Is Drupal right for me?
If I were to not use Drupal or any CMS, I would put all the HTML above and below each page's main content in "header" and "footer" include files, and then include the "header" and "footer" in each article I write. Ultimately, I want Drupal to do this for me. Am I heading in the right direction expecting Drupal to make my life easier with such a basic requirement?
Thanks for any insight,
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Matthew Doucette / Xona.com™
Comments
For what you describe
Drupal is probably actually overkill.
I'm all for encouraging folk with lots of actual content or plans to migrate to a CMS, but I'm just thinking the Drupal learning curve may put you off.
Coming from nothing, it's pretty easy to get something pretty cool up and running, but coming from knowing exactly what you expect it to do, you'll find a few problems bending it to your will.
Everything CAN be done, but it requires a bit of a mindset change.
Just an opinion...
.dan.
http://www.coders.co.nz/
.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards
This tutorial will give you
This tutorial will give you a good start:
http://support.bryght.com/articles/converting-css-html-design-phptemplat...
As for clean urls, you can enable them in settings and then either manually alias your pages to your exisiting urls (if your content is limited) or use the pathauto module to do it automatically.
Regarding the header and footer sections, basically you choose one of several themes in drupal and then customise the header and footer section through administer>>settings (although knowing php and html/css will give you more options). I would suggest themes based on the phptemplate engine as it is the default theme engine in drupal from 4.7. You need to first install the phptemplate theme engine and then choose, install and try out one or more of the phptemplate themes available on the themes download page.
Going by your description, all you need to use are the 'page' and 'story' content types of drupal.
Hopefully, this has answered some of your questions.
Edit: Well, dman beat me to an answer and also added some important tips about the learning curve. I was going to add that you should be prepared to spend a fair bit of time and take things slowly.
If you are looking to ramp up your site in a big way in the future with lots of content, you are definitely doing a good thing by moving to a database driven site using Drupal.
The nice thing with Drupal is that you can keep your site as static-looking as possible (no logins and other fancy stuff, as you mention) and then, in a matter of minutes (well, I am exaggerating a bit;-)), convert it into a dynamic, community-driven site with all kinds of bells and whistles.
Drupal would work nicely for
Drupal would work nicely for you.
THis thread covers a wide variety of ways to accomplish this
http://drupal.org/node/31896
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Thanks!
Thanks for the feedback. I have looked into this more. My opinion at this moment is that Drupal is overkill. I also realize that Drupal is a solution, but one it seems like I have to fight to make do what I wish... (maybe I should call it "work hard" instead of "fight".)
This is probably the most wrong place to ask, and if it is, completely dismiss this question. Is there a simple CMS that *just* publishes articles, where I can include html above & below via SSIs? CityDesk is one, actually, and I am considering purchasing it.
Thanks for the help.
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Matthew Doucette / Xona.com™
Why not Wordpress then? It
Why not Wordpress then? It isn't exactly a CMS, but it is free and I am pretty sure it can handle server side includes.
I will look into Wordpress
Thanks for the suggestion, Ramdak. As long as Wordpress can allow me to create what is above and below the page's content (and use css) then it can probably do what I want. Can I control the URL structure? If I want my page to be "xona.com/pong", for example, can I have the article exist as "xona.com/pong/index.html"?
Thank you!
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Matthew Doucette / Xona.com™
Frankly, I don't know,
Frankly, I don't know, although a little bit of searching suggests that there are ways to have SS includes in a php document.
As for the url's, I think WP can handle them quite well.
CityDesk
I just tried it in CityDesk, and it seems to work well:
xona.com
Half the pages are made manually, the other half with the CityDesk CMS. (I mostly want the CMS for article writing, as that is what takes the most time to maintain.)
i am concerned with no updates to CityDesk, which is the main reason I want to switch away from it. I will keep Wordpress in mind. Eventually, pending lack of CityDesk updates, I will switch to something else.
Thank you all for your help.
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Matthew Doucette / Xona.com™