By Petergrant on

I have a corporate website designed on Drupal and that uses the Drupal CMS. Very easy to use.

I contracted a new firm to redesign the website, and they are adamant on not using Drupal and changing it to their web publisher.

This new web publisher has none of the simplicity of my Drupal CMS and I absolutely need to retain my CMS because of a my high volume of daily content upload.

QUESTION: can I take my proposed redesign template and transplant it onto my current Drupal website so that I retain my CMS?

⋅ Categories: Drupal 8.x

Comments

anil614sagar’s picture

anil614sagar commented

Hi,

No need to change CMS just to change the style and template of the site. Create a custom theme in drupal to modify your site look & feel.

For more information http://drupal.org/documentation/theme

Cheers,
Anil Sagar,
Lead Drupal Developer,
Azri Soulutions,
http://azrisolutions.com/

Petergrant’s picture

Petergrant commented

Thanks Anil,

But the question is: can I use the redesigned template as it is (the files) and upload them to drupal to update my current website?

Or do I tell the Drupal programmer to literally 'copy' my proposed redesign onto my current site?

anil614sagar’s picture

anil614sagar commented

Hi Peter,

New theme has to be build according to Drupal Standards. The files you are talking are the PSD files or style sheets ..? If style sheets then building the new theme is very easy. If PSD's then who has experience with building drupal themes has to do the work of building the new theme.

Cheers,
Anil Sagar,
Lead Drupal Developer,
Azri Soulutions,
http://azrisolutions.com/

Petergrant’s picture

Petergrant commented

Thanks Anil.

jjmackow’s picture

jjmackow commented

Hi Peter,

The quick answer to your question is. Yes you can.
Drupal is a type of Content Management System (CMS) that uses a programming language called PHP to interact between a web server (Apache most likely) and a database which is most likely a MySQL database. With the exception of the actual picture files on your website, the 'content' part of your Drupal CMS is the MySQL database.

Part of the push back from your developer may be coming from either being unfamiliar with Drupal or it may also be that the version of Drupal you are using is a bit antiquated. New Drupal system and templates are currently being built in Drupal version 6.x (currently at 6.22) or Drupal 7 (currently at 7.8 I believe) .

Do you happen to know which version of Drupal you are using? If you have admin access to it, you can determine this by going to your sites following screen:

http://YourWebSiteDomain.com/admin/reports/status. This is the URL for R6 and R7, and I believe it is also the one for R5 as well. If you are using R6 or R7, You should be able to lay in a new template quite easily. Your template, by and large, will take care of the general layout of your web page screens. If your developer is pushing back on this then perhaps the issue is that they are not familiar at all with Drupal and are more comfortable using their own preference in CMS. As a point of curiosity, did they mention what they work with? Was it Joomla, WordPress, .NET?

If your system was created in version 5 or 4, your developer may see the task of upgrading either of those release to Drupal R6 or Drupal R7 a bit daunting, and quite frankly if that is the case I wouldn't blame them. Depending on the complexity of your site's design, and most importantly, its dependence on 3rd party modules, upgrading it can be quite complex. Many times business managers don't consider all of the specific tasks and business processes that their web sites do, and aren't able to clearly understand these complexities, but consider this if you would. THese tasks can be anything from interacting with facebook, selling products, selling products with various attributes (like shirts that have shirt sizes andshirt colors), blogging, advertising for revenue, the list goes on. I don't know if this drives my point home on complexities, and I apologize if I'm sounding too fundamental on my descriptions, but I've noticed in my experience that the complexities of a web server's functions are often taken for granted within the business realm.

Good luck with your solution.
Kev

cheers,

kev