Retrofitting CMS into an existing site?

CMS & WordPress
1

We are a non-profit healthcare-related organization, with 10+ years’ worth of content in place. As you can imagine, having out-of-date health information online could be a problem! I am investigating whether a CMS exists that could meet our needs and fit our environment.

Other requirements:

  • Flexibility: we have a mix of classic ASP, ColdFusion, and static HTML pages that would need to be managed.
  • Archiving: ideally, we’d like to move out-of-date content to our intranet in some automated fashion.
  • Content rules: we need to apply different expiration periods, depending on the content. For example, meetings and organizational content might need to remain online for a period of three years, healthcare information for 1 year, and news items for 60 days.

Or, perhaps a CMS is not even the right solution? If we could more precisely manage the catalogs on our Google Box (which we use for site searches) and create some hooks between our Web server (IIS 6) and the file system, that might do the trick–but I can’t envision how to create something like that.

So, I have way more questions than answers right now. I would appreciate everyone’s feedback! :slight_smile:

2

Well, take comfort in knowing that you are not in an entirely unique position. This happens quite often these days because web development technology has been evolving quickly over the past 10 or so years and websites have often been cobbled together to meet deadlines or provide various functions in an adhoc fashion. Now that we have some pretty amazing CMS solutions available I expect we’ll see less of it happening… I hope.

I would suggest picking one of the top CMS frameworks and migrating the entire site over to it. You can use 301 redirects to mitigate the loss in any SEO value and/or bookmarks / inbound links that may have been established. Some CMS’s also allow for aliases so you can permanently ensure that old urls will keep working.

My pick would be Drupal. I know it will do everything you want but then again, I’m biased :wink:

Good luck!