Noob here, but I've put in several hundred hours of Drupal reading (about ten hours worth of material, rest spent digging finding it and yes I hope to have time to contribute to the docs team) and a couple dozen hours on the installation/configuration of my XAMPP/SVN-based localhost stack running from a thumbdrive - lots of fun so far!
We're in the middle of doing a complete overhaul of our site design, not just look & feel but also navigational structures, so this is a perfect opportunity to switch over to a CMS, both as a learning experience for myself and for our site's ability to expand with dynamic community features in the future. 98% of the pages will be static; in fact the only "dynamic" feature I see us using to start with is the contact module! I completely realize this isn't "how it's done" in Drupal-land, but please humour me if you will.
I'd like to generate everything from Drupal on my localhost using wget etc., and then upload that static 98% to our shared host account as plain old html/css to avoid the unnecessary performance drag of the overhead involved with dynamically generating content that's never changing.
Dynamic features like contact forms (and in future login to forums) will be handled from standalone sections linked to from primary navigation, rather than integrated into every page.
So what I'd like is for the usual 99.9% of our visitors to browse the static HTML portions of our site, but to have Drupal "ready to kick in" when one of them clicks on Contact Us. I'm having trouble visualising how Drupal will keep track of what the visitor's doing, in fact I reckon it can't as long as they're in "static land".
OK, just thinking "out loud" here (PLEASE correct me if I'm totally off base) what about using Drupal's multi-site feature and have each "trigger spot" of functionality be a separate site (only technically, as far as the Drupal plumbing is concerned) with its own customised "front page", blocks config etc.?
e.g. contact.example.com brings up the contact form, in the future - forums.example.com, news.example.com etc. - would bring you to their specific areas of the site.
Would this same "multi-site" capability be possible with subdirectories rather than subdomains?
e.g. Could example.com/contact example.com/forums example.com/news
be treated as separate sites by Drupal?
I imagine a solution for this would involve mod_rewrite and/or .htaccess - anyone willing to point me in the right direction? (even if you think I'm actually headed for a dead end <g>)
Of course, I would want the user to feel that they are just navigating one site - all of these "sub-sites" would share the same database and theme folder etc. in settings.php, correct? In fact off the top of my head, only the administration settings would be different. . .
Thanks in advance
Hans