I've been mulling this over for awhile, especially with Drupal 7's new database abstractions, and having Fields in core. When you're building a new web application with Drupal and an existing database, when should you use Nodes as the basis of your site? I have a database that I already keep information in, so I don't *need* nodes, but nodes have some nice features (especially the "revision"). Is it common practice to integrate legacy databases into Drupal as nodes, or as their own system of modules?
For an example, we have a list of our customers in our database. I could use the Fields and Node modules and create a custom content type that knows how to store customers, but ought I? Or is it more common to write a module that makes a path called example.com/customers?
Comments
I think it depends on how you
I think it depends on how you see the existing data "integrating" with the rest of Drupal. The are lots of modules that build on node content providing a rich set of features. There is also the views module which "understand" nodes (as well as some other data structures). To use views with your custom tables you would need to provides all the details/definitions to views, doable but can be a lot of work.
Views
Ahh, Views integration. I hadn't thought about that, but if the D7 version of Views supports Fields, then it may be wise to expose as much data as I can through Fields.