By sir_thomas on

I'm looking to create a site for my band. All I want to do is have a back-end login page where only one specific user needs to have access to the back-end portion of the site. From here content will be able to be edited. This content will only be editing a "News," "Concert/Show List," and a photo album. I do not need or really want to have the option to create new pages, or even new content. Additionally, I'll want to embedd into my already created css/html site, not use templates or edit templates to fit my needs. Is How would I go about using Drupal to do this? Specifically the embedding of the content from the database into an already created site. Drupal too involved for this and therefore unnecessary? Would using a simple news editor such as the one found and used at squidfingers.com be better for such a project? I've got to run to class, but if anyone needs more clarification of what my intentions or goals are, please ask. I want to use Drupal, but have been scared off on the implementation of it into a site design of my own, and with it's abundance of seemingly unnecessary atributes.

Thanks in advance.

Comments

sepeck’s picture

sepeck commented

Drupal may not be for you if you want to use your already created pages and are unwilling to port your theme to Drupal. Drupal is not really for managing *.html pages.

It would work for you were you willing to convert your existing theme/content to it thorugh. It might be a little more power than you need but that's alright. So, you would create two users, one 'admin' user for site maintence and the other would be the account you use to post content.

You would turn off user registration (easy) and hide the login block. You would login to your site www.sitename.com/?q=user (or with clean_url's www.sitename.com/user), use page module, taxonomy, menu and image modules. Editing could be done through a web page or with a blogging client utility.

You would then have a site with built in RSS feeds (useful for people wanting to track your band) and easy to update content yourself. If at a later date you decided to add a newsletter, you just download simplenews and you have it. If you want the band to have a blog, then you just turn on blog module. Easy flexible, simple.

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain

-Steven Peck
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Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide

rjung’s picture

rjung commented

If all you really want is to maintain a handful of pages (like you said, "News", "Concert List," etc.), then yes, Drupal would be overkill -- you may as well just edit raw HTML by hand, upload them to a site, and let people have at it.

On the other hand, as someone who maintained a hand-edited HTML site for several years, I'll say that "feature creep" tends to sneak up on you. Sure, you have just a handful of pages today, but what if you want to sell T-shirts later? Or offer MP3 samples of your music? Or have a forum for your fans to chat? Or a blog discussing your recent concerts and experiences? The more stuff you add, the more difficult the raw HTML becomes, and the more you end up wishing you had gone with a CMS in the first place.

My own recommendation is to bite the bullet -- build a new site with Drupal, create a template, maybe even manually import all your existing content to the Drupal site if need be. It's a bigger investment up-front, but you'll reap the rewards later, when you don't feel like you'd rather slash your wrists than manually update the formerly-just-three-pages-site-that-has-now-ballooned-to-300-pages monstrosity...

--R.J.
http://www.electric-escape.net/

--R.J.