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By bollwyvl on
So I am trying to push a drupal replacement for an existing XML-based in-house CMS solution for a pretty good sized customer. I've worked on several OSS and proprietary CMS, and really like what drupal has to offer. What I am wondering is if anyone has had any success running Drupal as it was designed on a backend server, performing static caches of the site, and deploying those to production. I think this solution is about the best I can do given the tools available. Take a look below, and let me know what you think. Thanks in advance!
Environment
The environment I'm dealing with is pretty brutal due to web apathy and Sarbanes-Oxley constraints: I am pretty much limited to
- Solaris
- Apache/1.3.27
- PHP 4.3.1
- Oracle (8.1.6)
in my production environment, which I can only touch through draconian scheduling jobs. I have to work with at least three individuals to get apache environment changes made, and it takes hours to achieve anything meaningful per user requests. Even connecting to the database is a pain, and is completely unoptimized. I can't have mod_rewrite, so I have to do high-level paths via nearly-empty directories linking back into the main application. Essentially, it's so bad that I don't really want to fight with it any more.
Behind the firewall, I have a lot more flexibility, and my group runs its own server for various management tools. Hence, I could run Drupal there on PHP5, a more recent version of Apache, and a database that isn't 7 years old. When I'm ready to go to production, we could use a one-line shell script to pull it over to the review server, and push it to production.
I am pulling in a lot of data from other parts of my organization, primarily via Oracle interfaces, but also some really nasty screen scraping, but none of it is real-time, and could happily wait a few hours.
There are some things static HTML won't do
The features not supported by static HTML:
- search: acquiring a google search appliance, easy
- contact forms: hack something, hard
- extranet quote generation: hack something, harder
As far as I can tell, this would only require customizing a theme to strip out internal "community" things like comments and generate enough PHP code to hook into the mini-applications above which would then be passed over to my testing suite and eventually the world. This process could even be built into a module.
If you have any experience doing anything along these lines, or would be interested in collaborating on something like this for your enterprise customer, I would be excited to work with you.
