Move existing community site to Drupal

Posted by VanTheManiac on November 9, 2009 at 12:47pm

Hello,
I'm sorry but here's another post from a newbie that needs to move an existing site to Drupal.
I've installed Drupal 6 and stumpled through several forum posts and tutorials and I feel like I'm drowning... :(

I'm working on a site using PHP+MySQL that now needs to be converted to Drupal and I don't really know where to start.

First of all, I don't know if I could/should keep my file structure and database tables from my old site or start by scratch with Drupal? Today I've got a basic file structure:
\
\_image\
\_css\
\_js
\_pages\

Under _pages all subpages are placed as separate php-scripts (loaded from index.php at root depending on navigation).
Should/could I place all this under sites\all\themes\mytheme where I've placed a theme that I thought looked similar?

Today I've also got a user-table in MySQL with 20 columns containg 50+ users. Should I keep this parallell to Drupal's usertable (and use Drupal's user table only for admin users) or do I need to merge these two?

What's the best way to handle different navigation depending on the user types?

Once again, I'm sorry if there's already a bunch of similar post but I felt I had to try my self... :O

Cheers!

Comments

There are a couple of things

Posted by mradcliffe on November 9, 2009 at 2:06pm

There are a couple of things you should take the time to think about.

The way your site is displayed (css) is a theme. How your site is laid out can be part of the theme, but also configured within Drupal (blocks, menus, views). The content of your site is generally created separately in nodes.
Think about the content that your audience consumes and break it down into chunks. Something like "blog post" or "news post with ratings and video content". When you start to do this you can think about how to build content types in Drupal that will match the experience in the old site. All content should be generated by going to node/add if it's main site content. Lists of content, users, categories can be handled by Views.
I would migrate all users as Drupal users. You can use Drupal's role system to give users different roles (which inherit permissions).
What different types of navigation do you have? If it's to split administration and user functionality, that's already done. There's a separate admin menu and user account menu. You can also create other new menus that can be configured for certain roles. Access control to content itself is handled on a different level. If you mean access control for certain types of content, then that's handled directly at the permission level.

Many thanks!

Posted by VanTheManiac on November 9, 2009 at 3:33pm

Wow, thank's a lot for a fast an good answer!

1) So where's the best place to place my current files (images, swf's, javascripts etc) if it's not in the theme?
Directly under root of the Drupal installation or where? I'd like to do it right from start...

2) Thank's a lot for explaing the use of Views - that was new for me!

3) OK, is it the most common way to add the columns to the user-table or is it to add a user_extra table, to not get conflicts on future Drupal upgrades?

4) Today I've got a drop-down-menu for the site that got different items depending if the visitor is logged in or not, and also depending of the user type. I guess that could be translated to roles?

Thanks again! Appreciated a lot!

_

Posted by WorldFallz on November 9, 2009 at 3:45pm

You shouldn't be interacting with the drupal db until and unless you know exactly what you're doing. You'd be better off using something like http://drupal.org/project/user_import to get your users migrated.

__{Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.

If you find my assistance useful, please pay it forward to your fellow drupalers.}

.

Posted by mradcliffe on November 10, 2009 at 1:36pm

1. It depends on what type of media. Again, a node (content) could be a flash node (there are tools for that). So you would add it as a node. And then it would get uploaded via drupal's file system to sites/default/files. The same for images as seen in image galleries... Javascript files, you probably don't need this anymore.

3. If you're thinking about adding like First name and Last name you can do that either with the core Profile module, or you can turn user profiles into nodes via the contrib Content Profile module. User_import will import profile module fields. I think the migrate module will too.

4. You got it. And you can control menus with roles.

_

Posted by WorldFallz on November 9, 2009 at 2:58pm

The only thing I would add to mradcliffe's excellent advice is to not keep your existing tables/files whatever. You're just going to complicate your life in the future. Depending on how much existing content 'pages' you have, you can either copy & paste new content or write a little a script to import it. My advice is to always bite the bullet up front, spend the extra time necessary to setup the drupal site properly at the beginning, and then you'll save loads of time and effort later on since the site will pretty much be on auto pilot.

__{Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.

If you find my assistance useful, please pay it forward to your fellow drupalers.}