I have been working on a project to convert a a fairly large website for a non-profit from being a large collection of individual .html pages to a data-driven site.

Working with a skilled php/MySQL programmer, we have been converting sections of the site, based on specialized kinds of content, into MySQL databases with php front ends to display and interact with the material. Examples of these specialized databases include: 1. a resource database with "add to the database" ability by some users. This resource database has important sophisticated features such as the ability to assign multiple authors to a document (done via a linking table, NOT by adding extra author fields to the resource table). 2. a list of affiliated congregations with admin features to update that list.

I really like what I see with Drupal. My question is: if we were to use Drupal, would we be able to preserve the work we've already done with these databases of specialized content? Would these databases be able to become Drupal plug-ins? Would they be hard to convert to Drupal plug-ins? Or would we have to link to this material in directories outside of our Drupal directory and have links on those pages back in to our Drupal-based site?

Thanks for your help.

Kelev

Comments

markj’s picture

Hi Kelev,

You may not need to develop plugins. http://drupal.org/node/18429 shows how to use multiple databases in drupal. I have also had luck integrating an external database-driven script seamlessly into drupal -- see http://interoperating.info/mark/?q=node/44 for an example and some explanation.