[support] Bits of dynamic drupal integrated with static site

[Larry Garfield]

Honestly, I think you're over-engineering things. :-)  If you're concerned 
about the performance of dynamic pages, switch on page caching.  That can 
make a hundred fold difference in performance.  If you don't want stats info, 
you can use aggressive caching which gets even more speed.  For still-more 
performance, use the fscache module (I think that's what it's called), which 
caches to the disk and doesn't even have to hit a database.  Your few dynamic 
pages, like forms, then "just work" like the rest of the site.

You'll get almost as good performance as explicitly static pages with far far 
far more flexibility and less of a maintenance nightmare.  It's also a better 
skill to learn for maintaining Drupal sites. :-)

On Monday 11 June 2007, Hans Henderson wrote:
> 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


-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of 
exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, 
which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to 
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of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."  -- Thomas 
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