Introduction: How to Install Drupal
About: Wayne Peters is the owner of The Creation Studio, a website design firm located in Ontario Canada.
Drupal is a very powerful open source Content Management System that is highly customizable. Out of the box Drupal can be a bit basic, but with hundreds of modules available by the Drupal Community, one can develop a feature rich website to meet exact demands.
Some of the most popular websites on the Internet are made with Drupal, such as The White House, Greenpeace UK, and countless others.
Installing Drupal is quite simple. We will be providing you with a step by step process that, when followed closely, will allow you to install the Content Management System: Drupal. As long as you have some technical know how, you should be fine.
What You Need to Get Started
Domain Name: This is a name given to an IP related to the hosting space that you are provided with. You register your domain name with a Registrar, whom you typically pay a yearly fee to for the domain name registration.
Although it is becoming more difficult to find quality domain names, there still are great ones to be found!
Once that is registered, you will need to point the domain name to the nameservers of the hosting provider. This is done through the Domain Manager of the Registrar's website.
Hosting: You need somewhere to host your Drupal files and database. This is know as website hosting. Typically, if you use a website design company for the design and development of your Drupal website, then they would host the site for you. If you are doing this yourself, then a simple Google search for hosting should get you on your way. The server space that you are given should have a LAMP setup (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and cPanel is highly advisable in order to set up your database.
FTP Client: You will need an FTP client to upload your files from your computer to your hosting space. Of course, you would need to know your hosting username and password to connect the FTP client to your server space. One really great FTP client is Filezilla, which is open source as well. That is what we use.
HTML Editor: You will want to have a good html editor such as Dreamweaver by Adobe to edit your files. We also suggest Photoshop to design the graphics for your theme that you will want in order to make the site look good. Adobe has a product: Creative Suite Web Edition, that is $1899.00 but well worth it for web development.
Now we can begin... Please click on the next step.
Some of the most popular websites on the Internet are made with Drupal, such as The White House, Greenpeace UK, and countless others.
Installing Drupal is quite simple. We will be providing you with a step by step process that, when followed closely, will allow you to install the Content Management System: Drupal. As long as you have some technical know how, you should be fine.
What You Need to Get Started
Domain Name: This is a name given to an IP related to the hosting space that you are provided with. You register your domain name with a Registrar, whom you typically pay a yearly fee to for the domain name registration.
Although it is becoming more difficult to find quality domain names, there still are great ones to be found!
Once that is registered, you will need to point the domain name to the nameservers of the hosting provider. This is done through the Domain Manager of the Registrar's website.
Hosting: You need somewhere to host your Drupal files and database. This is know as website hosting. Typically, if you use a website design company for the design and development of your Drupal website, then they would host the site for you. If you are doing this yourself, then a simple Google search for hosting should get you on your way. The server space that you are given should have a LAMP setup (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) and cPanel is highly advisable in order to set up your database.
FTP Client: You will need an FTP client to upload your files from your computer to your hosting space. Of course, you would need to know your hosting username and password to connect the FTP client to your server space. One really great FTP client is Filezilla, which is open source as well. That is what we use.
HTML Editor: You will want to have a good html editor such as Dreamweaver by Adobe to edit your files. We also suggest Photoshop to design the graphics for your theme that you will want in order to make the site look good. Adobe has a product: Creative Suite Web Edition, that is $1899.00 but well worth it for web development.
Now we can begin... Please click on the next step.
Step 1: Download Drupal
You can view the whole tutorial process in the video above.
Drupal can be downloaded from http://www.drupal.org. Be sure to save and extract the file on your hard drive.
Step 2:
Upload the files to your server hosting space via an FTP client like Filezilla.
Step 3: Create a Database
Log into Cpanel on your hosting space and create a database. Please review video in the first step for complete illustration on how to do this.
Step 4: Configure Your Site
The next step is attaching your database to your site. Please review the video in the first step to get a clear illustration on how to do this.