One website, one domain, but two different technologies?

Question

Hi everyone, 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

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

With regards to #1:

Big picture, while it's tough to say with the level of detail you've specified I'd say you'll probably want to make the system homogenous: use one technology and permanently redirect the legacy pages. It'll be much more cost-effective to maintain. Port the legacy WordPress content over to a new, single system.

With regards to #2:

If you're using ASP.NET, you can write an implementation if IHttpHandler to do the URL redirection, issuing an HTTP 301 (permanently moved) so that Google knows where the content has been moved to. I'd imagine other technologies have similar capabilities.

With regards to #3:

If you're using a single technology, this issue should be alleviated.