Here's my plan to convert a live site over to Drupal (the matching theme part is already done):
1) Install Drupal into a folder (/drupal-5.1/) in the document root of my live site
2) Import old static content page-by-page using path aliases to give new files matching URLs
3) When everything seems to work well, add a couple lines to my HTACCESS file to redirect requests to /drupal-5.1/ whenever a file does not exist.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ drupal-5.1/$1 [QSA, L]
4) Remove the old files, one at a time. As each page is removed, its Drupal version should take over automatically.
So far, on the test server, it seems to work fine except for one serious problem. All internal links in Drupal add the physical folder information into the link:
So pages with a link like this:
http ://site.com/my-old-page.html
End up with an href like this:
http ://site.com/drupal-5.1/my-old-page.html
Of course both links work but the new drupal link is fugly and not acceptable since it feeds two URLs to the search engines.
How do I tell Drupal to pretend it's located in the base folder? Alternately, where might I insert code to re-write the base url in drupal so as to get rid of the /drupal-5.1/ part?