[support] Folding old site into Drupal structure

[Michael Prasuhn]

This is incorrect. At least in the case of Apache and standard Drupal  
rewrite rules. Drupal doesn't look through directories for files to be  
served, Apache does, as it is the web server, Drupal is just the  
application running on top of it. All Drupal pages are served by  
accessing index.php, either directly in the form of example.com/ 
index.php?q=node/12 or through an Apache rewrite rule that redirects  
requests such as example.com/node/12 to the former address. The way  
that the rewrites work, is that when a request to a file such as  
example.com/node/12 comes in, apache tries to find that file, if there  
is a directory called node, and a file in it called 12, then Drupal  
will never be bootstrapped, because Apaches rewrites files that it  
can't find, to Drupal. This is how the static files of Drupal are able  
to be served up.

In short if you type in a URL to an existing file, Apache (or whatever  
webserver you are using) should serve it without bootstrapping Drupal.  
If it can't find that file, it will ask Drupal to bootstrap and return  
the corresponding content. If Drupal doesn't know a page at the  
request path, then it will return a 404.

So if you put static html throughout your Drupal directory, yes it  
will work, and the files will be served.

One heads up before you start this, is that by default directory  
listing is disabled in .htaccess, and the only index handler enabled  
is index.php. If you want to send your users to example.com/some/ 
static/directory/content/here/ and have the index.html, or index.htm  
file served automatically, then you will need to add that to the index  
handler section of your .htaccess.

-Mike

On May 17, 2008, at 12:19 PM, Cog Rusty 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.

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Michael Prasuhn
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