Drupal and seamless integration of legacy infrastructure at MBDA.gov

For the record, let me affirm what many here already know, Drupal
truly allows the freedom to produce a scalable, stable and secure
production environment incorporating mission critical legacy
infrastructure. As part of our portal redesign project the basic
requirements included the seemingly insane task of seamlessly
integrating no less than two database formats, two server side coding
languages all within at least 3 major themes all via Drupal. Over a
four week period we worked out all the technical obstacles -- and did
so without any Drupal core module changes of any kind. I wonder if
other developers out there have similar stories of successfully
integrating legacy components into their fully Drupalized web site? I
hope to inspire someone out there with this post!

Our site URL: http://www.mbda.gov
The Minority Business Development Agency Web Portal

We utilize a LAMP setup on Dell servers running VM Ware, with Drupal
PHP/MySQL using the newer MySQLi driver. For our legacy business tools
and user registration system we integrated remote access to our remote
Oracle 11G database server plus a localhost instance of Cold Fusion
MX7 in the application layer.

Briefly, as to modules:

For Oracle connectivity, we installed PHP with OCI8/Instant Client
support and installed a simple module that allows OCI8 connections and
queries/result sets to be integrated into anyplace we can use PHP
(templates, blocks, etc). We added queries to our Oracle 11G database
to return data used in our graphs and application data that
dynamically display in sidebars and other pages. We wrote our own
global module for site wide tasks such as adding custom style sheets,
functions used in all themes, etc., otherwise we installed roughly 50
modules to handle everything from security, admin and content
management add-ons and various features on the site.

We also rely heavily on the VIEWS and PANELS modules for customizing
the layout and adding in some fancy widgets including our event
calendar, archives, slideshow, and category (taxonomy) pages.

Briefly, as to themes:

Our portal has one main theme and numerous sub-themes for content
organization. The main theme used for the home landing page and the
"blue" section (view portal using link above) was based on the
Marinelli theme, but you won't recognize it. We used it only for the
menu system and it's relative stability, otherwise our header/footer
and template layouts are all custom designed. The other content areas
such as the "red" Press Room and "gray" Workspace areas, including our
Intranet section and a few custom page layouts for our interactive
maps, are all actually sub-themes in Drupal. We use the Page Theme
module to automatically switch themes based on the path and rely
heavily on PathAuto, URLAliases and Taxonomy to organize our content
by path and maintain SEO optimized friendly URL's as well. Our
content manager really appreciates this automation.

Our business apps written in Cold Fusion MX use a cached version of
the Drupal header/footer so the look and feel of the site is
maintained. No frames!

Our site isn't finished, this is just the first phase of many to come
and I'm sure we missed a few things or typos here and there as we
rushed to release this. But not bad for a first effort, and we did
manage to make sure all our legacy apps and various databases work
together under one framework (Drupal).

If we can do it, so can you! Feedback welcomed

-Jim