By Minty on

Converting from a live static site to Drupal must be a pretty common requirement, but doesn't seem well documented.

This is not a question about styling, layout etc, but about the workflow where the old site must continue working during the development of the new site.

Can anyone explain the steps needed to keep an existing site live while developing the Drupal version? What is 'best practice' in this situation?

All suggestions and comments appreciated!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

behindthepage’s picture

behindthepage commented

Build your drupal site in a subdomain e.g. drupal/yoursite.com.
Then when it is fantastic and you know what you are doing,
copy the files across and voila it is now live.

gpdinoz
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." - Albert Einstein

Regards
Geoff

Minty’s picture

Minty commented

OK many thanks for the help.
This is how far I get

  1. Example site is live at www.example.com
  2. Create a subdomain www.test.example.com and load all the Drupal files in the subdomain. (If set up in www.example.com, it supersedes the static site.)
  3. Set up the database in www.example.com or in test.example.com. (I don't suppose it matters as this is dealt with in settings.php)
  4. Get everything working in test.example.com

Now everything is working, is it correct to:
Copy all the Drupal files from www.test.example.com to www.example.com. May need to amend the baseurl in settings.php, but effectively, both sites are identical using the same database.

Are there any issues for the site navigation, clean urls etc?

ghankstef’s picture

ghankstef commented

If you have a well structured static site (that is the html is well structured), you should be able to write a script to search through your site (or a copy of it), pull out the meat of the content with perhaps some regex, and insert it as a node into the drupal database.

Obviously, the devil is in the details

Minty’s picture

Minty commented

Thanks also for this.
This may be helpful for others, but not too much of an issue in my case as generally it will be static sites I have already built where I have access to the original content.