Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies - Installing Drupal
There are many resources out there on how to install Drupal, so I am going to go over this in brief in this post.
If your webhost provides you with control panel that has a script installer, check if Drupal is listed. An example of a script installer is Fantastico, which comes with cPanel. Using a script installer makes the process pretty painless. Make sure though that you have the latest version of any scripts you may install using a script installer such as Fantastico. Otherwise, you may want to visit the homepage and download the updates.
In our case, we want to install Drupal 5.7. Even though there’s a new version out (6.0), as of this posting a lot of the modules have not yet been updated to work with 6.0. So we’ll go with 5.7.
If you don’t have a script installer like Fantastico, or you just want to do the install manually, the process is a little lengthier but not too complicated. There are install directions at Drupal webisite, but I’ll break them down here for you:
1. Create a database and user, and assign the user to that database. Make note of the database name and username and password as you’ll need them.
2. Extract the drupal archive that you downloaded into a folder on your hard drive.
3. Using your ftp program, upload the files in this folder into your domain folder where you wish to install Drupal.
4. In your browser, type the name of your website where your drupal folder is sitting, and you will be prompted to enter your database information:
5. Enter the database configuration information from step 1, and then click on “Save Configuration.” If all is well, you will see this screen.
6. After this you will need to create a user account for yourself. This very first account that you create is designated by Drupal as the admin account and is a superuser account.
Your website is now installed and you’re ready to set it up, which we will cover in the next tutorial.
You can find more detailed installation instructions at the Drupal website (http://drupal.org/getting-started/5/install). If you have any problems doing this install you can post them here and we will discuss them, or you can also check the Drupal forums to see if there is a solution there.
In the next installment, we will walk through the process of setting up your new website.
3 Users Commented In " Building a Website with Drupal for Newbies - Installing Drupal "
After drupal is installed, one may wish to change drupal’s “outfit”, or so called drupal theme.
They can be found at http://drupal.org/project/Themes and most of them can be seen live, in action at unofficial demo at http://themegarden.org
Thanks for your comment. This is true, and I will be talking about themes in one of the coming portions of the tutorials. There are several things that need to be put into consideration first, and I will cover how to choose a theme and the factors you need to consider before choosing a theme, as well as where to find themes.
