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By lorikay4 on
I recently redesigned this site:
http://www.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/star/
It's already in PHP, mainly to take advantage of PHP includes, but has pages that would benefit greatly from databased management: lists of scientists' publications, phone directories, project lists, etc.
The thing I cannot glean from this site is a basic understanding of what specific steps are involved in taking my pages that already exist, converting them into templates THAT LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME as what is on the site now, and putting the content itself into nodes or whatever it is. And can I convert to drupal incrementally, leaving some pages completely static, while I figure out how to take best advantage of drupal's obviously sophisticated capabilities?
I am also curious about being able to control doctypes and the exact coding of the html emitted by the site. I hand code my own html, and don't want wysiwig help for the infrastructure; however, many of my content providers may need that.
Also, would it be possible to run both the internet site and the intranet site (yet to be designed) out of drupal?
Any help is appreciated.
Comments
it depends
You're asking a lot of great questions and everything you mentioned (and more) is possible, but it depends on how much time and effort you're willing to invest.
I believe your current site design is well-suited for Drupal, but converting it to a Drupal theme might not be not be a trivial thing. You might be able to get close to the same look, but there's bound to be some differences because of the way Drupal renders the output.
If you're used to hand-coding and controlling everything yourself than Drupal might not be right for you. You might consider a lighter CMS or a wiki.
Drupal is capable of running multiple sites from a single installation, but if you want to host Internet and Intranet sites from the same box you'll need to consider many network configuration and security factors.
thanks!
Is there a product that will not take control of page coding away from me? I worked with Vignette for almost a year, and hated it so much I left a job largely because of it. It wrote garbage code, and it was impossible to tell where the code you wanted to change 'came from'. I do NOT want to sign up for that again. Can you recommend a 'lightweight' CMS?
I don't mind spending some time, but in exchange for that time, yes, I do expect the site to be tag by tag identical to what I have now. I spent a lot of time designing it, and it's really quite modular.
I keep finding CMS products with lots of gadgets and features, which I don't much care about, but which are not set up to let me decide what elements need to be 'in' the CMS and what elements just live in the page templates. Again, unacceptable.
Thanks.
Drupal would work for you
Converting the theme would be easy. It is a fairly straight forward 2 column theme. You can pick and choose which doc type you want your theme to use. As a general overview, here's and article I wrote on porting a two column Yahoo GRID CSS template over to a Drupal theme. It's fairly easy so if you handcode, it's mostly a matter of populating variables into your template and then fine tuning.
For lists, taconomy module (categories) would definitly work for you. This is a Drupal based site that might give you an idea of what's posible. http://www.ent.iastate.edu/list/
For WYSISYG input, see TinyMCE which I belive can be enabled or disabled as you choose and may also be role based.
Generally Drupal doesn't deal with static pages on the same site. For existing 'static' page content, you could just open up and copy the content into a 'Page' type node set to Full HTML. For any dynamic pages you can choose php type content and then put your php code in there.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
excellent
There are these three page types:
home page, which could be considered one of the main types, or not, if it seemed necessary:
http://www.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/star/
the basic inside page, which is two columns
http://www.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/star/training.php
And a single column version of the inside page, which doesn't have the nav panel and moves the search up into the toolbar. It uses a breadcrumb trail to get you back to the regular navigation pages:
http://www.orbit.nesdis.noaa.gov/star/algalblooms.php
Also, this is a great forum. Many thanks.
If you design your base
If you design your base template that accomadates for blocks being present or not, then it's easy. You can configure blocks to only display on specific pages, to only display on specific utls paths, etc. You'd really have one page.tpl.php page.
I can think of a couple of approaches to the different page... One is a taxonomy theme module, the other involves more coding in the page.tpl.php which shouldn't be a problem for you if you code php much. In any case, it's certainly do-able.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
try staticising your site with HTTrack and then import HTML
I think you're looking at short-term slog (say, two to three weeks' work, with plenty of time spent on Drupal.org) for considerable immediate and mid-term gain. For a government website, consider maintaining three sites: one a test site for trying out new features/modules/functions, one a staging site for mirroring live content, one the real website.
For the formatting question, read up on the templating engine. You'll have to put the main content of pages into a node and consider other items (the left-hand navigation/footer/header) as independent regions in the layout. For the greatest control over layouting, read up on regions in 4.7 - http://drupal.org/node/29139
If your current site is only using PHP for includes, I'd consider hoovering up the entire site to HTML with httrack to produce a static site then using the Import HTML tool. See: http://drupal.org/node/46013
For producing the custom database info and enabling moderated updates from users, create content types with CCK. Your users will get idiot-proof forms for keeping their info up to date, and you can create search tools for subsections of your site.
Some immediate added value of Drupal:
- separation of themeing from content (you can tweak the design of the site over time)
- url aliasing/clean urls
- attaching static content (pdfs)
- stats/logging
- automatic sitemap
- breadcrumbs
- drupal generated metadata (timestamp, author, etc.)
- revisions/versioning
- tagging content (the Drupal taxonomy is a simple idea, but extremely powerful)
- syndication via rss newsfeeds
- access control (granular authorisation is trickier, but by no means impossible)
- the search tool
- a bibliography module is about to be released for scientific publications
- the glossary module will help you with the acronyms section, with the added value of mousover definitions on each page
- potential community features (newsletters, structured contact forms, etc.)
- From experience, tinymce is extremely good as a Wysiwig tool, and enables toggling between HTML and ; it also offers a 'paste from Word' option to clean dirty MS code (for high volume doc-cleaning from Word, Zapadoo's WordCleaner is always worth the small investment)
For the intranet, I agree that it would be best to set up a separate site architecture (with all the associated staging/database/backups), but to keep a common module and theme codebase with the website. As you seem to be looking after a government research intranet, keep in touch as I work for an EU research body and our intranet/extranet needs might overlap.