Introduction
Welcome to the doorsteps of Drupal, the current buzz of World Wide Web. Today more than 1.5% of all websites rely on Drupal as their back end support and many more are on their way to join in the march to make this technology the most affordable and effective way to broadcast websites with unique faces. From government houses, corporations, media & publishing companies, social communities and individuals, the usage of Drupal is extensively increasing year after year since its birth in 2001. From a recent estimate, it is found that 7.2 million sites use Drupal. Proud winner of Packt Open Source CMS Awards and Webware 100, Drupal is all set to take the next gen Internet world into complete control.
What is Drupal?
Drupal is a free to download and available open source software package for social publishing system from the brain house of Dries Buytaert. It facilitates an open source content management system (CMS) and content management framework (CMF). With its base code in PHP is maintained and developed by a large community of more than 630K users and developers globally. As the name suggests, it is a free to download and share software and is distributed under the terms of GNU General Public License.
Why Drupal?
Taking over the conventional content management system (CMS), Drupal brings a whole new dimension to designing a website with great features of flexibility and also facilitates easy management.
With its cutting edge platform, it supports and runs on any computing system with web servers running PHP and a database with series of SQL and DB.
In spite of its complex programming interface, in actual the users need no technical mind or coding knowledge to create a basic website and administer.
Here is a quick run through the steps needed to have Drupal for your system:
Even before you begin with Drupal, ensure to have the following requirement in your system for a successful download and running of this software.
- Disk space: Minimum 15 Megabytes
- Web server: Apache 1.3, Apache 2.x or Microsoft IIS
- Database server: MySQL till 5.0.15, PostgreSQL 7.1, SQLite 3.3.7 or higher
Though many websites currently run on Drupal 6, it is highly recommended for new sites to use the latest version of Drupal 7.
Follow these seven major steps to install Drupal:
- Download Drupal: Visit Drupal site and download the appropriate “tar.gz” or “zip” file link attached to the version of Drupal you intend to download.
- Upload Drupal files: Now upload these Drupal files into your web hosting through navigating the HTML directory in the control panel and finally renaming the file as desired.
- Create a domain to point the Drupal files in the directory: You need to check with your respective Internet Service Provider (ISP) for details for creating your domain name and thus pointing it to the directory.
- Generate configuration file and provide necessary permissions: When you upload the Drupal files and archive it, it will point as the default.settings.php meaning it is in read only format. Hence you need to copy this file and rename it to settings.php; now you should temporarily change the permission to read and write enabling you to modify the website through web browser as needed.
- Create Drupal databases: You need to create an empty and new database for Drupal. You should also add a user with full access to this database. Popularly used “
phpMyAdmin” is one such example. However it is highly recommended to check with your ISP for the kind of database available with them. - Run the installed file/ script: Now that you have successfully created the needed files/domain/database, navigate your website URL. You can find the Drupal installation page in there. This will guide you from here for setting up your Drupal website.
- Installation is complete: Once all the above steps are done accordingly, you can view a message popped up stating installation is complete. However you many need to add more features and design to your website for it really hit the traffic. You can visit Drupal for more modules and themes.
Transformation from the existing CMS to Drupal is slowly but steadily taking control over effective web hosting management. With its various unique and flexible features, Drupal is making all-important websites to turn towards it. Major organizations are taking Drupal as the cost effective and efficient way to host their sites. Hence, Drupal deserves the title of base for tomorrow’s website creation.
About the Author
Rebecca is a blogger by profession. She loves writing on luxury and technology. Beside this, she is fond of gadgets. These days she is busy in writing an article on futuristic architecture.
