[support] Bits of dynamic drupal integrated with static site

[Hans Henderson]

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
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