Rebuild existing site with CMSB

Thanks Dave - I was thinking along the lines of a subfolder, perhaps password protected. But what I am not clear about, is what will happen to all of the links once I delete the existing site and then move the new site into the root? Won't the individual pages still be pointing to /subfolder/ ?

Yes, they will but because there are much fewer files (since it's database driven you don't have an html file for each page) you can update them a lot quicker.

Another approach is just to have your new php files in the same root dir as the other files. Since no one will no they are there they won't be able to link to them.

Hope that helps!

I have used the "same root folder" approach as Dave mentioned. I simply created a PHP wrapper template and converted the pages one by one by copying the content on each old page to the CMS Editor. Once I was satisfied that the content rendered properly, I adjusted the navigation to point to the new pages and removed the HTML pages. Worked just fine, but is very labor intensive. I know of no other way to convert existing HTML pages.
I used another method to convert another large site. The client agreed to leave most of the existing older news articles in their HTML format and refer to them as archived news then simply begin a new "Latest News" section with CMS Builder. With a little imaginative trickery, it is practialy transparent.