By DL on

I'm currently converting a static site into drupal. This site is a news site so they have an archive of static pages running for 5 years now. Transferring all the pages into drupal would take ages so the site owner asked me to keep the static archive pages as is and just make a link in the new drupal-based site to the archive. How do I install a new drupal system without affecting the archives? Thanks.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

VM’s picture

VM commented

Drupal serves content from the databse, I suggest looking into one of the import modules to import your static pages into Drupal rather than seeking a way around Drupal.

DL’s picture

DL commented

I look into that. There was a suggestion to create a drupal folder in the public html folder and then make a redirect from mysite.com to mysite.com/drupal. Another was to create a link in the drupal-based site to the archives. The owner really doesn't want me to meddle on those static archives

Live hard, Ride harder

US421’s picture

US421 commented

Hopefully the archives are in their own folder to cut down in confusion but installing Drupal will not change existing static files. The problems start when you want to redesign or if you want to use the info in the new site. If you are just starting fresh with the old files kept for archive reasons you should be fine.

You can always import them later as well.

DL’s picture

DL commented

Yes, all the archives are in separate folder inside the public html folder. Importing might be in done in the near future but is not as urgent.

How do I make drupal the new site without having to change the folders of the archived pages?

Live hard, Ride harder

US421’s picture

US421 commented

The only situation I can forsee a problem is if your folders have the same name as some of the Drupal folders such as /sites/ or /modules/. Otherwise the folders shouldn't change.

If the links to the folders are in the form of http://example.com/may/ and you are used to have index.html load automatically you will have a problem because Drupal will only load index.php. You can either rename index.html to index.php or link directly to the file like http://example.com/may/index.html.

If you are having a different problem you better lay it out as I am out of guesses. :)

drupalnesia’s picture

drupalnesia commented

sorry, I don't understand what do you and/or your owner want. please explain:
- do you want all static pages convert to Drupal? or
- do you want a dinamic Drupal site but all static pages still remain as static?

DL’s picture

DL commented

they want to keep the archive of the news articles as static but they want to move forward from their previous static pages so they want to move to drupal without having to port everything to drupal.

Live hard, Ride harder

drupalnesia’s picture

drupalnesia commented

Transferring all the pages into drupal would take ages so the site owner asked me to keep the static archive pages

Talking about transfering site, if it is impossible to copy and paste from Drupal website then u have 3 choices:

  1. Create a new folder, i.e: public_html/old_page/ and put all static page there and maybe require to fix any link for file/image
  2. directly access drupal table: "node" and "node_revisions" then copy-paste from your static article
  3. same as #2 but you can make a small program to load the static page and perform a mysql syntax (insert into node). This step has disadvantage if your static page didn't use < title > tag, so you must manually fix the article Title.

Note for #3, some static article use < h2 > tag for Title then u can assume that this is the article title.