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.

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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?