Hi,
I'm new to Drupal but have lots of PHP/MySQL experience. I generally build sites using CodeIgniter, a PHP platform and it is one such site that I'd like to move over to Drupal. It'll be my first Drupal site but I've decided to throw myself in at the deep end with something quite complicated!

The site is a surf forecast site which takes and interprets huge weather files from the NOAA server every day. It contains over 3,000 surf spots which are sorted in the following taxonomy:
continent->country->region->spot

So, the first job would be to import what are currently 4 separate tables whilst maintaining the hierarchy.

This is possibly more complicated as I have the site set up as below (for spot info / reports and photos) and would like to try and maintain these URLs - e.g:
/surf_spots/asia/japan/okinawa/sunabe.htm
/surf_reports/nwp/japan/okinawa/sunabe.htm
/photos/nwp/japan/okinawa/sunabe.htm

The next issue is that the report data resides on a separate database. How difficult is it to pull this into a Drupal page?

There are plenty of other issues such as migrating photos, users etc but I figure they are a little more well trodden.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Chris

Comments

aramboyajyan’s picture

For URL structure check out Pathauto module:
http://drupal.org/project/pathauto
It is used together with the Globalredirect module which prevents appearance of double links to the same node (/your-custom-path and /node/1 which is Drupal internal path):
http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect

For hierarchy, check out core Taxonomy module or Entity reference
http://drupal.org/project/entityreference
or if you need something more complex, Relation
http://drupal.org/project/relation

For migration of the content and users, check Migrate:
http://drupal.org/project/migrate

For connecting to an external database, see this article:
http://drupal.org/node/18429

Lastly, it's better you get familiar with Drupal before you start really working on this. Going live with a wrong setup can cost you many hours and nerves later on. Break down the project into segments and model a couple of times on a dev server how would you do everything.


Website: aram.cz

Github: github.com/aramboyajyan

surfgatinho’s picture

Thanks for the reply.
I'll start having a play with the modules mentioned and see if I can figure it out.