What's the transfer process for converting an existing site from dialup to Drupal?

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laurenm@mit.edu

I maintain a site for a researcher & student. Site is due for a major update to accommodate noted (mobile, tablet) platforms and it's a repository for thesis & project documents. This current site dialup host has Athena for FTP remote.

Can we keep URL as it is?
How is the indexing search for pdf's of research papers, videos, etc.?

Please advise--
Lauren M.

8/1/13

csgiles@mit.edu

Static sites hosted in Athena lockers have a URL that takes the form web.mit.edu/[name], whereas sites using Drupal Cloud have URLs that take the form [hostname].mit.edu. If you build a new site at [hostname].mit.edu, you can set up a 301 redirect so visitors to your web.mit.edu/[name] site will be taken to your new site.

Here's some information from the IS&T Knowledge Base on redirects:

http://kb.mit.edu/confluence/display/istcontrib/Web+Publishing+-+Redirects

As for your documents, Drupal does not index the contents of uploaded files for search. It does, however, index the text content of site pages and nodes, so you could make documents findable through search by creating a content type that includes a title, description, perhaps some tags, and a field for attaching a file. That way, the title, description, and tags would come up in search results. If you combine this with Drupal's Views feature, you could feasibly make a nice sort of document library.

8/2/13