When migrating a website from any system to Drupal you should be aware of existing inbound links to your site, as well as search engine indexes and ranking. In order to maintain your search engine ranking and also not break inbound links you should plan to redirect inbound requests to old uris to your new drupal nodes.

Instead of offering up 404 Errors, you can direct users to the content they are looking for. In some cases using the path_redirect module may be sufficient. In other cases you may want to write redirect rules in your .htaccess file, and in still other cases, the method described below may work for you. Another step, which will help with search engine indexing is to install and configure xmlsitemap module and submit your sitemap to the major search engines for indexing.

The rest of this article describes an approach that will parse the Search Engine query from the HTTP_REFERER and search the drupal website for what the user was actually looking for.

Archive of Drupal gatherings from 2005-2008

If you upgrade a site from one version of Drupal to another, you must take specific steps to make your theme compatible with the new version.

Always test the modifications on a separate development server before moving to a production site.

When translating a site to another language, several problems can occur. If you think you found a bug in either a translation or in Drupal's locale module, please file bug reports against the project in question.

If you have a more general question you can ask it in the translations forum.

Here we collect some of the more common issues found.

See also Translation, multilanguage content, and internationalization.

Drupal 6 and later supports sharing a database with other web applications with the table prefix, also known as $db_prefix from settings.php.

The table prefix is defined in your Drupal site's settings.php file, and when it is present Drupal will place the prefix before each table name in the database. So if the table prefix were 'mysite_' then Drupal would look for tables named 'mysite_access', 'mysite_actions', and so on (instead of the default tables names 'access', 'actions', etc.) This allows more than one Drupal site, or even Drupal and other products, to share the same database, because the table names will not collide with one another. You can have another Drupal instance with table prefix 'mysite2_' sharing the database with 'mysite_' and indeed many other instances as long as each one has a unique table prefix.

If your hosting company only provides you with one database, then sharing it between multiple Drupal sites with table prefixes can be a cost effective alternative to paying for extra databases!

This is the customization guide and 'how to' guide for implementing business functionality and features into your Drupal site.