[support] Folding old site into Drupal structure

[Cog Rusty]

On Fri, May 16, 2008 at 9:13 PM, Tenant <tenant at tenant.net> wrote:
> We run our own server (Debian) with many virtual domains. For many of
> the newer sites using Drupal, we've followed the protocol of
> installing Drupal -- in /home/drupal/public_html -- with each site
> getting it's own directory in  /home/drupal/public_html/sites/mysite.com.
>
> For all modules and themes we install in
> /home/drupal/public_html/sites/all/modules (or themes) and that works
> very well.
>
> Works very well as long as we point mysite.com to
> /home/drupal/public_html  in Apache vhosts.conf. All this certainly
> takes a load-off from reinstalling updates in each domain.
>
> However we have a few domains that are quite old (mid-90's) and have
> extensive hierarchy of static files. We would like to upgrade those
> sites to Drupal over time. So here's the question...
>
> I could overlay Drupal in /home/old-site/public_html, then use Front
> Page to keep the old site look & feel and even use menus to point to
> older pages and use this setup while -- over time -- we would convert
> old material to Drupal pages. And vhosts.conf would stay as it is for
> that domain.
>
> But doing so would require doing twice the number of
> core/module/theme upgrades, a pain I'd rather avoid.
>
> Alternatively, could I  install all the old site content files under
> /home/drupal/public_html/sites/mysite.com - and then change vhosts
> and get the benefit of single upgrades?
>
> Or (third option) could I use symbolic links under  /sites/mysite.com
> that link to the old site files and directories?


I don't fully understand how you want it to work, but when Drupal
looks at sites/sitename it only expects to find a settings.php file
containing a database url. It will serve no site files from there.



> Are there other ways to approach this dilemma? Thanks for any thoughts on this.
>
> Jeremy
>
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