Dear Drupal Forum,
I am thinking of using drupal for our new website. The old website (www.oceanvoyages.com) relies on a custom mysql db and a crappy php/html front-end (I can say that because I wrote it, years ago). I like the advantages of tinymce/image_assist with drupal (if I can get them to ever work) for data creation, not to mention drupal's layout, organization, and useful plugins, but am unsure about the wisdom of transferring the data from the old db into drupal's format.
My questions are:
Is it easier to use drupal as a front-end and use my old db for the dynamic content (plugging in custom php code into story nodes)?
-or-
Convert the old db to drupal's story format somehow automagically, so the data will be able to take advantage of all the excellent drupal features. I don't think this will be too hard, but does anyone have any examples or ideas? I was thinking I would need a separate script to output the data from the old db into a clean html file, and then this could be imported into the drupal story table.
-and, lastly-
Are drupal stories, if they include images and text, stored as a type BLOB? Is there some easy way to extract that information again out of mysql, and separate images from text if at some future point I decided to leave drupal?
Cheers,
kilolima
Comments
Data from one CMS to another
Regarding data from another CMS to Drupal can be pretty straghtforward if the existing site uses a database (partculary if it is mysql). What I have done is export the existing tables I want to import into Drupal (both structure and data). If there are existing drupal tables with the same names, I edit the table names in the export. Now import the data into the drupal database. At this point you need a script (I write a tempory module) that reads the old table(s), convert the data appropriately for Drupal, construct a node in code and use node_save() to save it. You can also do the same type of thing for comments. Details of course depend on the existing data.
I would recommend moving the data into Drupal because it lets you take advantage of Drupal features.
As for images and Drupal, images are stored on the filesystem (not in the database). The reference in the html is either a standard html img tag or image filter tag.