Drupal Basics
by Jamar Bibbs
May 21, 2009
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Drupal is an open source CMS that could be the answer to
your sites CMS woes. Today we'll show you how to get Drupal
up and running on your server and even add a little style.
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A CMS can simplify the life of both the developer and the
site admin, and the wrong CMS can make their lives painful
to say the least. Enter Drupal, the Open Source CMS that has
all the features you need to create, maintain and grow your
site, be it a personal web space, entertainment site or your
corporate presence. In this article I will take you through
the basics of Drupal, from installation to the use of themes
to change the look of your site.
First, your web host has to have the software requirements
in order to install and use Drupal. Those requirements
include:
- Apache web server. Althought Microsoft IIS has been
successfully used, most developers use Apache, Because of
this, there has been more community experience and testing
with Apache.
- PHP - PHP 5.2 is recommended, PHP 4.3 is required.
not available.
- MySQL 4.1 or MySQL 5.0
Note that although these are the basic requirements,
there are some additional requirements for all of the
functionality of Drupal to be utilized. These include memory
limits, register_globals has to be turned off on PHP, safe
mode has to be off on PHP, etc. Most hosts already have PHP
configured that way, and if not, you can use your .htaccess
and php.ini files locally to overcome these limitations.
Installation
The first thing you'll need to do, obviously, is to download
the latest version of Drupal from the Drupal web site.
Currently that is the 6.12
release. Once downloaded, untar
(unzip) it into a local folder so you can work with the file
locally.
Next, before you go any further, you'll need to create a
MySQL database on your web host. Usually this is done
through a CPanel admin interface. You'll go to MySQL
Admininstration, and will create a new MySQL 5.0 database.
Click here for larger image
Once that's done you'll be presented with the various
aspects of your new database, including:
- database name
- port
- database host name
- username
- password
You'll want to keep this information handy, as you'll
need it to complete the information in your installation
process. From here, the process is about as simple as
installing an application on a Windows PC. Just follow the
prompts--enter the information you saved in the above steps,
and BAM!, you now have a basic Drupal CMS installed on your
server. Now lets configure some additional details to get
the site up and running!
Once you've gotten to this point, you will be presented with
something that looks like this when you go to your Drupal
site:
Click here for larger image
Drupal Basics
Drupal Basics Continued
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