Drupal installation page tutorial
Now we can take the final step and go the Drupal installation page (Drupal.org calls it running the install script). You have now taken all the steps to get your Drupal sight up and running, but now is the true test. Enter your site name (iebuildyourownstory.com) into your browser, and hopefully you will be presented with a Drupal installation page. As you can see on the left side of the screen, Drupal will take you through several steps. First, choose Language should appear on the main screen. Click the Install Drupal in English link beneath it. For the second step, Verify Requirements, Drupal will automatically check to make sure everything is OK, and if you followed the steps above, you should be taken to the Database configuration screen and the Set up database step should be highlighted on the left side of the screen (not sure why the screen titles don’t match the names on the left). Since we already set up the database, on this page you just need to provide Drupal with the information from the database you set up earlier so that it can add tables, etc. to the database. Enter of the fields on this page refer to the database you set up through your webhost, so remember to use the correct information, then enter it into each of the fields.
We can ignore the Advanced options at the bottom of the page because the default settings are fine. Once you are finished, cross your fingers and click the Save and continue button at the bottom of the page.
Configure site page
The next page is the Configure site page. You should see something similar to All necessary changes to ./sites/default and ./sites/default/settings.php have been made. They have been set to read-only for security. Basically, what this message means is that drupal entered your database settings in the settings.php file. If you open settings.php, you will see that the following line $db_url = ‘mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename’; has been updated with your information. One trick to finding information in files like these is to type Ctrl+F, which brings up the Find command and it will search for whatever you type in the Find what field. The direction buttons tell it what direction to search. If you just opened the document, you can leave the Direction button as Down and it will begin looking from the beginning of the document down to the bottom. In this case you can type $db_url, which will bring up the first of several lines beginning with $db_url and you can look for the line with your information. If you did not create the settings.php file, deleted default.settings.php by accident, or did not make settings.php writable, you will receive a message indicating a problem. Go back to the Create settings.php File and Make settings.php Writable sections.
In the Site name field, the name of your site should appear automatically, but if not, enter it yourself. You can enter the full name of your site with the .com part or just enter the regular name. I suggest leaving out the .com part, but it is up to you. In my example I used Buildyourownstory. In the Site email address field, enter the email address for outgoing emails you want to use for notification to the users of your site. Most hosts give you several email accounts and you can use one of those here if you already set it up through your host. You would have to check with your host on information about your email accounts. If you don’t have that set up yet, you can enter any old email address you want. I don’t think using your personal email will work, but at least you can use it as a placeholder.
In the Administrator account section, in the Username field, enter whatever username you would like. In the E-mail address field, enter whatever email you would like. You can enter your personal email or your site email. This is what you will use to access your Drupal site as the administrator. Make sure you don’t forget this information because I’m not sure how you can get back in as the administrator if you forget it. The administrator account has complete control over everything in Drupal. Don’t use this account for everyday use of the site. Create certain users with different access to perform the everyday tasks. More info on this later.
In the Server settings section, in the Default time zone field, choose whatever time zone you want (set in army time obviously).
Clean URLs
The Clean URLs section could be problematic for many of you as it was (and still is) for me. If you can, choose the Enabled button. Clean URLs basically make your site easier for search engines to find. If they are not enabled, people will need to type ?q= to access your site from a browser, so obviously it is important. If you don’t have the option to choose and it is set at Disabled you can still move forward but you definitely want to get it fixed at some point. If anyone can explain to me how to do this please let me know, because I can’t for the life of me figure it out.
Finally, in the Update notifications section, make sure the Check for updates automatically box is checked, which gives Drupal the ability to sent you any updates and notifications. This is important with all the upgrades and new versions with Drupal. Click the Save and continue button and…
….hopefully you will be taken to a page that says Drupal installation complete. You may also see some error messages, which we will look at in the next section: Troubleshooting Common Problems. Normally these issues are not that big of a deal. Be aware: this does not mean your site is ready to go! I didn’t have too much of a problem getting to this point. My problems started at this very point because I could not connect my site with my host.
You should also see a message saying something like You may now visit your new site. Click the link and you will be taken to a page titled Welcome to your new Drupal website! To learn how to get started, go to the Working with your Drupal site page.
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