First a minor clarification. While this serise has been titled a redesign, we're really talking here about first doing a re-implementation in order to enable a re-design.

.htaccess

Once a site is in produciton it's best to do away with .htaccess for performance. This is simple enough as the directives in .htaccess can be put in the Apache configuration file. For these early stages, though, it is great to have a .htaccess file so you can make changes without having to restart. Drupal ships with a .htaccess file that works for re-writing URLs so one can do "clean" URLs.

The problem with the site at hand, however, is it needs to still access the old site while the new Drupal site is going up around it. Drupal's .htaccess file contains the following directives that we are concerned with:

This tells the webserver that if a client requests a file and there is no file by that name and no directory by that name to send /index.php instead and to take the requested "page" and send it as an argument. Thus /node/3 becomes index.php?q=node/3. This works fine if the user requests a regular file. However it breaks down if they request a directory. If a user requests /oldsite/ Apache doesn't know that the "if the file doesn't exist" part applies to /oldsite/index.html until it is too late. Apache merrily serves up index.php.

To solve this problem (and a couple of variations) we add the following three lines before the three above in the .htaccess file:

With today's post I'm going to start profiling some hints and tricks for migrating an existing static website to a new site managed by a content management system. As it has been for the last few dozen projects I've worked on Drupal is the content management system of choice.

Background

The website in question started as a small collection of web pages. Early on (sometime before I got involved) the choice was made to use server-side includes to provide a semblance of control on the design. Over and over files were created and pages added. According to Google there are now roughly 2,600 entries for this site in their index.

In the early days of the site there was a dilemma. Since there was no content management system where people with information could make it available to users they had to send it to the webmasters. This quickly becomes a resource drag and the information suppliers are then told to put their information in PDF documents. With this history, the one-page PDF is more common than it should be. Much feared, the one-sentence PDF also makes frequent appearances.

The need for some automation drove the connection of several Microsoft Access databases and a small number of PHP scripts. With several processes left half-baked what should have been a help offered little assistance. Instead of posting a single-sentence PDF directly, the process grew into a series of e-mail the PDF, a webmaster posts the file and copies and pastes several entries into an Access database. Since that didn't cause enough problems there is then a step of FTPing the Access database to the server. The server uses ODBC connections to other data sources, but for this particular process they were never setup.