What is Drupal?

Drupal is a free and open source modular content management system (CMS)written in the programming language PHP. A CMS is a tool used by Web administrators to automatically track online visitors and prepare customized content for consumption, usually as HTML-based Web pages. Drupal, like many modern CMSs, allows the system administrator to customize the content and display of the Web site with little or no programming.

Drupal runs in many environments, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, FreeBSD, and any platform that supports either the Apache (version 1.3+), or IIS (version IIS5+) Web server and the PHP language (version 4.3.3+). Drupal requires a database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL to store content and settings. (Requirements are available at Drupal’s web site).

As of October 17, 2007, the current version of Drupal is 5.3. The first beta release of Version 6.0, which has reached “feature freeze,” occurred on September 15, 2007.

How to setup drupal ?

Step 1.

Download the installation file from Drupal.org by choosing the desired version and clicking on Go button and then on Download link at the bottom of the page.

Step 2.

Upload it in public_htmlfolder of your account. You can do that via ftp with a client like FileZilla or via cPanel, File Manager, Upload file(s). This way, afterthe installation is completed, the file script will appear once your write something like www.yourdomain.com. Or you can create a subfolderthere and upload the file in it. The Drupal installation will be accessible by something like: www.yourdomain.com/subfolder.

Step 3.

When you are in cPanel -> File Manager navigate to the uploaded file and extract it by clicking on Extract File Contents. It will create a subfolder: drupal-x.x.x.,where instead of x.x.x. is the current version. So you can move the files one level up in the desired directory. The other option is toextract the file in your computer and then to upload the content in the desired folder via FTP.

Step 4.

Once the files are extracted in the desired folder, you should create a MySQL database for Drupal. You can do thatfrom cPanel, MySQL Databases. There you should create a database and add a user to it - click here to learn how to create MySQL database and user. Then open file database.mysql in subfolder /database/ and copy the text from it. Open cPanel -> MySQL Databases -> PhpMyAdmin(a link to it is placed at the end of the MySQL Databases page), choose the Drupal database and navigate to SQL tab. There paste the text from database.mysql in the text window and click on the Go button. This way you will import the database for Drupal.

Step 5.

Open sites/default/settings.php and edit it. Fill in your database connection details in the following line:

$db_url = ‘mysql://username:password@localhost/database’;

Then fill the following line about the URL of your Drupal installation:

$base_url = ”;

Step 6.

Open www.yourdomain.com/where_Drupal_is_extracted/ and follow the instructions in order to create an account and to log in.

Step 7.

Well done! The installation procedure is finished.