At 01:07 AM 5/19/2008, you wrote:

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.

Thanks for the reply, but I wasn't asking about Apache rewrites. I think the question is more in the realm of what are the best practices for placing existing html static files within a Drupal hierarchy? If I have an existing site of several thousand static html files (which we do), should they all be placed under /home/drupal/public_html/sites/mysite.com/files ? Or is there a better way to do this? If I do that then the URL becomes ugly and unwieldy, i.e., http://mysite.com/sites/mysite.com/files/contentfile.html

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.

Thanks for that tip. I should not that when I first started tinkering with Drupal (4.7), I too an existing site and just overlaid Drupal on top of it. Most of the existing site stayed where it was directly under public_html and only newer stuff got put in the files directory. Yes, Drupal's home page took (index.php) took over from index.html, but that was OK and intended. I then used the Drupal home page menus to direct to existing pages of the old site. that worked fine and it gave us a new Drupal install going forward while allowing us to convert the old files to Drupal over time. But that was with only one Drupal site. Once we got into ver. 5 and now ver. 6, newer sites are starting out with Drupal and we converted to the multi-site hierarchy, which is great. So I'm really looking for a way -- with an existing large site -- to fold in Drupal into the multi-site hierarchy. Again, I hope I'm making this clear and thank you for your responses.