Greetings,
I'm a relativly new user to Drupal, but I'm a long time developer in Wordpress, php-nuke, osComemrce, Zen-Cart, etc.
I just took over a website built with static html pages, and I'm converting it to Drupal. Becasue of the very high serach engine rankings on some of the static pages, I want to make sure I keep the URL's intact. however, I want to begin to manage the content of the page with Drupal.
Wordpress has a feature that allows you to extract nodes ($content) from Drupal and display it in external pages (same server, just in the web root instead of within the drupal directory structure). If I can do this in Drupal, it would be eactly what I need.
Is there such a feature in Drupal?
Thanks in advance.
Comments
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I think you might be better off moving away from where you are now, if you are seriously going to adopt Drupal long-term. If you haven't got LOADS of static pages, you might consider this page's advice about migration using 301 Permanent Redirect commands. This will certainly be a viable solution if you have a few dozen pages.
There is also other info on that page which might be of use. Personally, I would try and move towards SEO and user-friendly URLs as soon as possible.
Hope this is of some help.
Drupal Build & Development in Nottingham by Kineta Systems
what i've done
in the past when i've worked on converting static pages, i've had a two tiered approach.
first you want to get the data from those html pages into the system, and use the path module to give them the alias of "oldhtmlfilename"
then once they are all there, you go and administer urls, and create aliases for "oldhtmlfilename.html" to point to the same node you created with "oldhtmlfilename" as the path.
this way, requests for those pages will still bring up the same content, but rather point to the right pages without the .html extension, and will render with the "oldhtmlfilename" in the url field of the browser.
i do it that way because, the first alias you give is what drupal defaults to when rendering, and over time as all the search engine bots come crawling back through your site, they will give you the clean pathname in their links.
NOTE: i've only tried this on pages with "clean urls" enabled. i don't know if it will even remotely work without them.
hope it helps.
What I do in such a case ...
Rather than set up two aliases ...
Make sure that clean URL's are functioning on the site. But that's a given because unclean URL's are not viewed well by the search engines.
Next turn on the path module.
With the path module the content add (and edit) form includes a section named "URL path settings". Simply enter the URL of the .html page there ... that is, the relative URL. So if your URL is http://example.com/some/path/file.html then the path to enter in this box is "some/path/file.html".
Copy the content of that page into the body of the node you're creating.
From then the official URL of the page will be the URL of the original page. You don't have to worry about moving any search engine ranking for any page, you don't have to worry about redirecting anybody from the old location of the page to a new one, because the page is still having the same URL it always had.
- David Herron - http://7gen.com/
+ David Herron - 7gen.com/, The Long Tail Pipe, davidherron.com/drupal-blogging-hints
keeping old pages
Yes, the "URL path setting" is the way to go. The drupal menue system at the same time allows to enter old static pages to the site navigation, so old and new style pages coexist and actual conversion can be done quietly one after the other (the home link of the old pages should point to the drupal home).
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http://amazonas.the-dot.de