By Dr. DOT on

Can anyone point me to where I can lean how to bring my existing look and feel (webpage templates, css, javascript, etc.) into Drupal to get my current site converted into Drupal format?

I tried loading everything into /sites/all/themes/myDomainThatIadded -- but that did not produce anything
I then tried renaming my index.html page (inside the directory above) to page.tpl.php -- getting closer but no styling present
I then tried navigating around Drupal in the Blocks section, etc -- but I'm lost...Blocks see to just change the Admin control panel within Druapl but I can't find out how to manage my site's public web pages

Is there any good documentation out there on the steps to go through to convert a working non-Drupal site into a working Drupal site?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

dddave’s picture

dddave commented

http://drupal.org/project/migrate

matt_harrold’s picture

matt_harrold commented

http://drupal.org/getting-started/before

From your question, I gather Drupal is quite a mystery to you at the moment.

A bit of general advice ... Drupal has a very clean separation between the structure of your information, and how it is presented to the end user.

Webpages (no matter what technology used to produce them) are usually broken up into regions such as headers, sidebars, main areas, footers, etc.

Some bits of information are going to be shared amongst pages, some only shown on specific pages ... you'll need to have a good look at your existing site and identify these different "chunks".

Try to do all of this without worrying about colours, fonts, etc ... just use the default Garland theme ... get your site content in order.

Then ... start to worry about getting a theme that MOST closely matches your existing site, and customize it.

I suppose you're asking (and attempting) a lot in one go ... try to break up your problem into little pieces.

Dr. DOT’s picture

Dr. DOT commented

Ok, thanks Matt.

My biggest challenge is that we are a large enterprise. We are trying to assess if Drupal can do everything we typically do using tools and technologies that have been mainstream for a number of years. We are staffed with designers that use Photoshop InDesign, Dreamweaver and a few other HTML editors/FTP utilities. We are also staffed with PHP/MySQL developers (like myself).

So I am charged with drawing a rather quick conclusion that Drupal can meet our needs. We have new projects in our pipeline and we would like to develop them using Drupal, if that turns out to be the way to go for us -- but the clock is ticking. Hence the reason why I am trying to tackle more, all at once. I am not interested necessarily in getting my current site pixel-perfect and ready for a new release. I am interested in understanding how hard is it to take a traditionally constructed web site and retool it to conform to Drupal-World. And what is the learning curve and the ultimate level-of-effort-time-to-launch a new site versus our current practices. I am having first-hand experience with this Drupal learning curve thing.

Also, I am really struggling with Domain Access and how to get all of our domains/sites under 1 Drupal install where we can share common page content -- if that is do-able.

And, I am trying to take a database schema that I produced for a custom app and figure out how to implement it in Drupal -- I have yet to find out where I go to create MySQL tables and column for a custom web app that needs to handle many rows in a relational DB setting.

I will take your advice and try to tackle this more Drupal-centric. But it has really been a change in mind-set. And finding good documentation on the "how to's" is a very time consuming task.

joelstein’s picture

joelstein commented

Welcome to Drupal! You'll find lots of guidance for migrating to Drupal on this page:

http://drupal.org/handbook/migrating

Good luck!