[support] Folding old site into Drupal structure

[Tenant]

Perhaps I didn't articulate the question properly. But one can serve 
site files from /home/drupal/public_html/sites/mysite.com/

I've used http://mysite.com/sites/mysite.com/
for files under:
/home/drupal/public_html/sites/mysite.com/

and the files are accessible. I have a files subdirectory for images 
and the like, but other subdirectories are also accessible. Now the 
files directory has a .htaccess file for security, but I never though 
about putting .htaccess under home/drupal/public_html/sites/mysite.com/

I suppose I could but don't have anything sensitive there. (thoughts 
on this are welcome).

What I'm really looking for is to find the best way to fold an old 
existing site (many static files) into the Drupal multi-site 
heirarchy. Should I move the site over to
/home/drupal/public_html/sites/mysite.com/ and put everything under 
the files directory?

Or should I keep the existing old site at 
/home/mysite.com/public_html and fold Drupal in over the old site? 
That would create a separate Drupal installation which would require 
additional upgrades.

My apologies if I'm not making this clear.


At 03:50 PM 5/17/2008, you wrote:
>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.


>> > 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?