Migration woes

[David Gillaspey]

Hi folks,

I've been planning to migrate my site (Great Church Websites, which hosts this forum) to a web CMS (Content Management System) in order to transition it to an online magazine format, with articles and regular columns. (Some members of this forum have expressed interest in participating in this endeavor.)

My website uses lots of PHP code, as well as SQL queries to extract data from mySQL databases.

Over the weekend, in an offline conversation with a member who was kind enough to answer a question, I was made aware of a potential stumbling block. Many web CMS's are built on PHP and backend databases. The problem is that my existing PHP code would interfere with this.

Has anyone taken a PHP-based website (with lots of PHP code and SQL queries) and migrated it to CMS? If so, please respond by sharing about your experience. Is the stumbling block surmountable, or not? Is there a CMS that wouldn't have a problem with the PHP code in my pages?

Aside from this problem, I'm looking for a CMS that specifically enables the editing, scheduling, and publishing of articles and columns. I found one in a proprietary CMS called Subdreamer (http://www.subdreamer.com), but their tech support also confirmed over the weekend what the forum member had earlier told me about migrating existing PHP-based sites to a PHP-based CMS. (Subdreamer includes the article publishing features I need, plus specifically is designed to integrate with vBulletin-based forums such as this one, as well as forums based on a few other programs. Thus I was really hoping it would work, and, perhaps, it still can be made to work.)

One thing I was wondering is if an ASP (Active Server Pages), Ruby on Rails (an up and coming programming language, or "web framework," whatever that means), or other programming language based CMS (that is, other than PHP) could be counted on to safely ignore all the PHP in the pages on my website, serve them (the pages) up as needed, and the PHP would be parsed as it would normally by the web server.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Sincerely,

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[David Gillaspey]

Hi all,

I'm in a position now to answer my own question.

In another post (in another thread),

http://www.greatchurchwebsites.org/forums/showpost.php?p=3583

I explained that I first tried unsuccessfully to install TYPO3 (http://www.typo3.org) (or, more specifically, the Web Empowered Church's starter package that is based on TYPO3; see http://webempoweredchurch.org). I've also compared several proprietary and several open-source Content Management Systems, notably Joomla (http://www.joomla.org), which I must say has a very appealing admin section. However, the key feature for me (in a CMS) is that I can insert PHP code at will in content and it will execute.

I have finally found an open-source CMS that permits this: Drupal (http://drupal.org). Of course, only admins and members with specific permissions can include executable PHP code in content that they add to a site. (Otherwise, it's a major security risk.)

Drupal also understands the need for and permits "static pages".

More about my migration later ...

Sincerely

David Gillaspey
President
Great Church Websites

[mrbelfry]

I too have unsuccesfully tried to install web empowered chuch starter pack. Has anybody ever managed to get it working?

[JackWolfgang]

I too have unsuccesfully tried to install web empowered chuch starter pack. Has anybody ever managed to get it working?

I was tempted by Mark's sale pitches in his book, but I was too far into setting up a Wordpress-based site.