Most people are aware of Zope as an application server for applications such as Plone, Launchpad etc. It also has an object oriented database that stores objects, which also includes standard files and folders.

I've often used this approached when consolidating old sites as it simplifies management. There is one security model, one database to backup and one management interface for all websites. Now when I move between different systems and servers, when Zope is up and running, I know all my sites are too. Users can then update their websites the usual way with ftp and webdav provided by Zope.

One such example is www.mekong-protected-areas.org an environmental and development site, which is now also hosted by Inigo.

If site specific theming is not an issue, uploading them into a Plone site via webdav or ftp will automatically integrate the html and images from the old site as indexed documents on a Plone site. This is usually the recommended option when organisations want to consolidate multiple legacy sites into one system. Old sites with a lot of documents are best suited for this, as immediately those documents will be full text indexed to be easily searched through Plone's LiveSearch feature.

An example of this kind of consolidation is www.apdip.net's old project sites and static html pages dating back from 2001.