Combining Drupal With An Existing Site

Submitted by learnbythedrop on Wed, 06/04/2008 - 21:13

Question: Can i design a website in dreamweaver and have only certain pages that will go to a drupal area which will use some of the social networking components OR do i have to have the entire site built as a drupal site?

Answer: You can build a static website and then link to Drupal as another section of the site. Let's say you build 'www.mysite.com' in Dreamweaver and you want to add a community function. You could always load the drupal files into a sub-folder called community and have your community located at 'www.mysite.com/community'.

The key to pulling this off and doing it well is to have the two sites styled in an identical, or at least very similar manner. You'll probably want to understand how Drupal themes work so you can skin the Drupal portion of your website to look like the existing site. So I recommend that you review the Drupal theming guide and also have a look at the Zen theme which is a very clean starting theme that you can alter via CSS.

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by Adam (not verified) - 06/05/2008 - 09:45

use ActionApps

CMS ActionApps can do that. It use SSI (Server Sides Includes) in embebed code inside shtml pages.
Regards,

by Chelsea (not verified) - 05/29/2009 - 08:26

Dreamweaver Extension for Drupal

If you are designing a site in Dreamweaver and want to translate your existing design to a Drupal theme, you will definitely want to check out the Drupal Dream Theme Utility Suite from www.dreamweavercomponents.com - a breakthrough tool set that allows Dreamweaver to interact with your Drupal theme templates like never before. This new Dreamweaver Component makes it easy to create a new theme from scratch, translate an existing design to a Drupal theme, or edit existing theme pages (even in Design View).

Learn more at DreamweaverComponents.com.

Hope this helps!

by John (not verified) - 06/18/2009 - 17:47

Theming considerations

Further to learnbydrops answer, the Zen theme is a great starting point but I have had great success with atck and gridbuilder. This is very flexible and robust.

I tried the Drupal Dream Theme utility and don't have anything good to say about it.

by Matt (not verified) - 07/07/2009 - 00:41

Tried it but...

I tried to do this by combining my wife's Etsy site with a Drupal site to display her Handmade Bags. However, since the Etsy design site doesn't let you make much customizations this didn't work. In the end I had to just create the new site and duplicate content as needed.

by learnbythedrop - 07/07/2009 - 21:30

I'm not familiar with how

I'm not familiar with how Etsy works but it's possible that there might be a problem with that approach. Most of the time I would recommend a site built from the ground up.