As I gained more familiarity with Drupal I began to wonder whether I could use Drupal to manage an existing inventory of our technology equipment at Frankllinville Central School. Like most school districts we are called upon to keep a tab on our growing list of computers, cameras, printers and other peripherals. It's a daunting task and in the past few years I've been tryring to move towards web based solutions that allow those of us charged with deploying new equipment to enter new inventory from wherever we find ourselves on the campus. I actually began our database over twenty years ago and it's migrated from Appleworks, Microsoft Works, DBase IV, Microsoft Access and in the past couple of years I've used MySQL along with some PHP scripts I'd generated to add and search the database.
Drupal of course sits on MySQL but I really didn't know how to add my existing table of data to the Drupal database. While I was at DrupalCon last month, one of the presentations I attended dealt with "Node-Import," which is a module that allows you to do exactly what I wanted to do. Yesterday morning I created a new Drupal 6.10 install in one of our Ubuntu 8.10 virtual servers and then downloaded Node-Import. I extracted the code, uploaded it to the server. I also downloaded CCK and and Advanced Help and the Date Module which are really required to use Node-Import. I decided to add the Bar Code Module along with Filefield and Imagefield as well as I eventually wanted to improve our inventory format.
I created a custom content type for CCK which I called "Inventory," then under Administer/Import Content I initiated the import of a CSV file from my exisiting MySQL database. I had to do a little studying to map the fields correctly but when I was done I had moved my entire database into Drupal and into it's own content type. Today I've been working to set up querys using Views. I'm really tickled that this works so well. It's just another example of how Drupal can be used. Thanks to the Drupal community for these great modules and Drupal itself. You're making my life easier.