The best is the enemy of the good. - Voltaire

One of the challenges facing the migration of a website from a collection of loosely gathered HTML and PDF files into a content management system is finding the balance between keeping the current site running and implementing the new site. In dreamland where information systems staffs and communications staffs are sitting about waiting for things to do there are plenty of helpers. In the real world it's not that simple.

This website started as a collection of pages in a single directory. Something like this:

As organizations are dynamic additional people come along and have some additional needs. In addition some departments have staff allocated who can do some HTML work and want to improve their sites. With time the directory grows to look more like:

Basically there are tons of files at the first level and a handful of second, third and fourth level directories. A little good fortune made this project easier. The existing site included a "include" directory. This is fortunate because Drupal has an include directory but it is called "includes".

In this case the "include" directory contains server-side includes and the includes directory can contain all the requisite Drupal includes. Had this not been the case it would have been necessary to do one of two things. Either look and see that the directories did not have any files with the same name and mix the two, or rename the existing directory and change all the files to point to the new directory.

With this stroke of good fortune it turned out that there was no overlap between the files in a standard Drupal install and the existing website. Since there is no overlap it is possible to have Drupal and the existing website co-exist in the same directory.

Now if a user goes to http://www.example.com/index.html they get the existing website. Visiting http://www.example.com/index.php brings them to the Drupal website. In order to keep things working at this point you must either move the .htaccess file or have Apache set to ignore it. For testing the best option is likely to move it as we'll want it back soon.

Next we'll look at how to actually use both sites together now that they're installed together.