R – One website, one domain, but two different technologies

crmerplegacy

I need advice.

I inherited a website that's been around a long time. The website gets a lot of organic traffic from Google. The business and website owner is upgrading the site to make the content more manageable. At the moment, a wordpress CMS powers half the site. Physical html pages make up the remainder of the site. Here's a summary:

1) Guide section which consists of a php wordpress driven blog found at http://mysite.com/guide. Individual pages in the guide section have urls such as http://mysite.com/guide/4930-hello-world or http://mysite.com/guide/489-welcome-to-my-site. The business owner spent 2 months populating these pages and is reluctant to scrap it for another system.

2) E-commerce section which consists of a thousand static/physical product pages. The product pages are NOT dynamically driven and no url rewrite rules are involved. The pages have urls such as http://mysite.com/products/239123-sofa.html and http://mysite.com/products/23-office-desks.html

The owner wants to use a non-PHP ERP or CRM solutions to power the website's e-commerce section and streamline some of the business' accounting, inventory, marketing and work-flow operations.

I have never worked with ERPs or CRMs before. Some questions I have are:

1) Is it a good idea to have one website under one domain driven by two different technologies? WordPress manages pages such as http://mysite.com/guide/4930-hello-world while a Microsoft application manages pages such as http://mysite.com/products/239123-sofa.html. As mentioned earlier, the business owner is reluctant to scrap wordpress because he put considerable effort into populating it.

2) What challenges will I experience implementing url-rewrite rules (because it's two technologies under one domain, but different sub-directories)? I need to make sure the website retains its Page Rank and SEO goodies.

3) What server configuration challanges will I experience?

I've never replaced a legacy system of this magnitude on my own before. I appreciate any advice or feedback you guys can offer. Also let me know if there's anything else I should research.

Thanks

Best Answer

You can think of a configuration where you have separate logical/physical back-end servers for each system. Then you can have a front-end proxy (for instance Apache with mod_proxy) serving all the requests and separating them between the different back-ends. This will also work as an application level "firewall" protecting you from unwanted requests, since you will only forward URLs that you recognize.

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