Starting a site with Drupal
Starting a site with Drupal can definitely be a good choice if it fits your needs. The main advantage of using a program like Drupal is that you do not need to understand CSS and codes in order to create your site and you can create a site quickly. It also offers the advantage that you can do some fairly complex things much easier than you would with a program like Dreamweaver.
The disadvantage of Drupal is that it can be difficult to download and it is tough to find quality answers to your questions. Hopefully the following tutorial will help you start your Drupal site easily.
Download Drupal
You can download Drupal from their site at http://drupal.org/. The first article on the page should include the newest release versions with links for you to download. If it is not there for whatever reason or you cannot find it, you can click on the Download tab at the top of the page, click the Drupal project link, and then click the Download link next to the newest release version. When downloading from this screen, you most likely just want to choose the most recent version available that is stable (if the status column has a green check mark, you know it is stable). The only reason not to choose the most recent version is if you have an older version of PHP. You should be able to find information on the correct Drupal version to use with your version of PHP by looking at some of the articles on the Drupal—Download—Drupal project page.
Extract Drupal
Drupal does not have its own installer file, so you need to install it yourself. This is one of the drawbacks of Drupal compared to a program like Joomla!, because Joomla! has an installer file which makes it much simpler to begin. Once you decide on the appropriate version and you click on the download button, a File Download page will appear asking, “Do you want to open or save this file?” Note: If your PC doesn’t recognize .gz files, then download a zip program like WinZip, 7Zip, or another zip program (most programs are free). Once you are able, choose Save and you can save it to your C:\Temp folder or wherever you want. All you are saving at this point is basically a compressed file that you need to decompress/unzip later, so it doesn’t matter where you put it. After saving the file, double click on it (should be named something like drupal-6.9.tar.gz and look like a stack of books) and your zip program should open up automatically. If it doesn’t, that probably indicates a problem with your zip program. I use a program called WinRAR and the following instructions are based on that program, but zip programs are all basically the same, so it should not be difficult to follow the instructions if you have another program. In WinRAR, select the folder named “..” or the folder with the correct title (in this case something similar to drupal-6.9) and click the Extract to icon at the top of the screen. That will open a new Extraction path and options screen. Make sure you are on the General tab and in the box underneath Destination path, choose the C:\htdocs folder. Once you have successfully extracted the file, you might want to change the name of the folder to drupal rather than drupal-6.9 or whatever yours is named. First phase is now complete!
Create settings.php File
In the drupal package you just installed, a file named “default.settings.php” exists (in my case it is at the following path: C:\htdocs\drupal\sites\default. You now need to create another file named “settings.php” in the same folder. I’m not sure why exactly this file is not part of the download, but Drupal’s installer will update the settings.php file automatically with the details you provide during the installation process. To create this file, you will need to make a copy of the default.settings.php file. DO NOT just rename the default.settings.php file, because you still need that file. Make a copy by doing either of the following:
1. Right click on default.settings.php and choose Copy from the dropdown menu. Then, go to an open area of the same folder and click Paste. This will create a file named “Copy of settings.php.” Rename this file “settings.php.”
2. Open default.settings.php, go to File – Save-As, and in the screen that appears, enter settings.php in the File Name box and click Save.
Make settings.php Writable
After downloading Drupal, you must make sure that the settings.php file is writable, which means you need to give Drupal the permission to make updates to the file. If you have a Unix-like system, which includes Linux-based systems and all Mac OS X versions, follow the steps below. If you have Windows, you can skip to the next step.
Write permissions with Unix-like systems
With Unix-like systems, you can assign write permissions to it with the following command from the installation directory:
chmod a+w sites/default/settings.php
or
chmod 777 sites/default/settings.php
Drupal should set the file permissions back to read-only once the installation is done. You should make sure this is the case and manually change it yourself if it didn’t happen. You can use the same command, slightly modified, to remove write permission:
chmod a-w sites/default/settings.php
or
chmod 555 sites/default/settings.php
I am not too familiar with these systems, so if you need help you can look in the Drupal forums or do a search on the internet.
Make settings.php read-only for Windows
For Windows, all you need to do is make sure the file is not labeled as Read-only. You can do that by following these steps:
2. Right-click the settings.php file, and then click Properties.
3. Click the General tab, clear the Read-only check box, and then click OK.
Now you basically have Drupal itself configured, but we can’t install it just yet. What you do now depends on where you will be testing your pages. See the DECIDE WHERE TO TEST YOUR SITE section of the How to Start Your Own Website Guide for help on how to decide.
As I mentioned previously, I think it is MUCH simpler to test Drupal through your webhost. However, you can learn a lot from setting up locally, so you could try to set up locally and switch to using your webhost if you run into any problems later.
See the appropriate article below for complete instructions.
Setting up Drupal locally
Setting up Drupal through webhost
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