I like taxonomies in Drupal and thinking about building a CMS on it for a website that has been online for years. I’d like to leave the database AS IS (it’s mySQL) to make sure the old CMS works as well – some people who use it aren’t willing to learn new stuff. The website in question is a products catalog and I’d like to extend it to also manage orders, inventory, samples and QA documentation.
It seems that using two databases – one for drupal itself and the other for data – has other pros as well. It’s like separating model from view.
I’m not a frameworks kind of guy – I rather like to do things from scratch employing only minimal number of dependencies and intermediary layers. I like the Drupal’s approach and appearances though.
Is Drupal the right tool for the job? How easy is it to use it with existing database without importing all the data into drupal’s db? Am I going right direction? Thanks a lot!
I think it is nearly impossible to reuse the existing database as is with Drupal.
If you still want to use Drupal, there is a rather sophisticated module to help moving the data to a database Drupal will like: http://drupal.org/project/migrate