I am wondering whether multisite provides the solution I am looking for.
Here is my dilemma.
I have a website which is fairly established (over 3 years old) and was built by developers before I got involved myself. Recently I discovered drupal which looks like it provides all of the answers to my prayers with regards to this site, however as the bulk of the site is already coded I was wondering whether multisite would be a good solution prior to a full site migration.
Currently I have drupal in just a part of the site but as its a separate are every section that I install will be a kind of deep link rather than higher level.
Am thinking that if I set up multisite with various parts of the site and link it to one database would that help me with integrating drupal or is it better to simply recreate the whole thing in drupal (which I think would be a big job).
Am looking for advice here as I don't want to try to tackle this and be barking up the wrong tree.
Any comments would be truly appreciated.
Comments
Depends on how
Depends on how connected/disconnected the sections of your site are. Is it a site that is just a lot of separate content?
The primary benefit of building out several different Multisites would be the single code base; you wouldn't need 8 installs of Drupal. A separate, complete Drupal install can exist in a sub-folder of another Drupal installation, however.
The only other thing is that if you had several separate Drupal sites, administration would be tedious. One Drupal installation is cleaner, but as you said, a big job.
Multisites
Its very intricately coded in the non drupal bit with lots of dynamism so its a big dilemma.
Multisite
I definitely think its going to have to be a multisite.
The problem is that its quite an established site with 88,000 indexed pages in google which have taken us a long time to achieve so I don't want to tinker with it too much.
I've been thinking about this a lot and thinking that maybe for now:
1) Drupal site for registered users and their associated profiles
2) Drupal site for anonymous browser information
3) Existing site without drupal but with links through to the drupal areas
However, what if I wanted to display parts from the other drupal sites in the other drupal sites?
Do you think that this would work or am I complicating it too much?
Someone has suggested a migration plan but the budget isn't there unless I do it myself and like I've said a big job probably beyond my skills at this stage.
Any opinions greatly appreciated.
Bite the bullet
If you have the budget, I would migrate the site all at once. If you don't migrate the site now, you will end up maintaining 2 sites in 1. It should be possible to script the migration from static HTML to Drupal if you know what you're doing.
Multisite
Budget is well and truly blown.
Having said that - any idea what the costs are for a migration plan? I know its a vague question but its worth knowing.
I simply can't keep shelling out for this site. It's cost me fortunes already over the years.
Quoth: "Recently I discovered
Quoth: "Recently I discovered drupal which looks like it provides all of the answers to my prayers with regards to this site,"
The real question is: What prayers does it answer, and will they be worth the trouble?
Assuming they are, and depending on the setup of the existing site(s), you might poke around with the Feeds module, which can be used like an import function. And of course, that implies that you'd set up your drupal installation as a multi-site.