Getting Started in Drupal
Last Update: Sun, 9th Aug 2009
This page is a brain dump of the road to getting started in Drupal. I setup up Drupal on my Mac.
- Go to http://drupal.org and get a feel the project.
- Join the drupal community by registering as a user at: http://drupal.org/user
- Then install drupal by following the spot on instructions http://drupal.org/getting-started/install
The only problem I ran into was that I need to use 127.0.0.1 rather than the default localhost to successfully connect through from drupal to my MySql database. If you have problems, that cannot be sorted via google or the docs, head towards the drupal forums.
- Setup multiple sites that can be run from a single drupal install: http://drupal.org/node/238805
When doing this it is important to update your hosts file (e.g. /etc/hosts) and know how to flush the cache, on the Macs this is with ‘dscacheutil -flushcache’. Also, know how to restart your web server because you’ll need to set up some virtual hosts. For Apache 2 that was just a simple matter of updating the the httpd-vhosts.conf file and restarting Apache with ‘apachectl restart’.
- I stumbled across this very useful article that tells you 11 things to do right after you successfully installed drupal: http://timonweb.com/the-11-most-important-things-to-do-after-you-install-drupal
Installing the Admin Menu module is an absolute must and to do this you need to know how to add/update drupal modules. Also, if you’re like me, take the time (no more than 5 minutes) to get familiar with Backup and Migrate module. This takes care of you backups, restores and hence enables you to migrate data from one drupal install to another. Also, nice features such as browsing saved backups and scheduling backups are very handy and give you peace of mind.
However, don’t do everything on the list above. As a drupal newbie I recommend doing 1, 2, 3, 8, 9 and 10. We’ll come back to the others once we’ve had some more hands on experience with drupal.
