Install drupal

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Contents 1 Introducing Drupal 6.1 2 Installing Drupal 6.1 – Fantastico De Luxe 3 Installing Drupal 6.1 – Manually 4 Basic Content Management 5 Drupal 6.1: Advanced Features 5.1 Themes Installation 5.2 Modules Installation 5.3 Multi-Site Installation 6 Backup Drupal

 Introducing Drupal 6.1

An open-source Content Management System (CMS) written in PHP, providing you with a powerful yet a easy to use tool for building your website. Drupal is a multi-platform CMS that runs on Windows, Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Mac OS X.

 Installing Drupal 6.1 – Fantastico De Luxe

• Step 1: Login to your Admin cPanel http://www.yourdomain.com/cpanel
• Step 2: Locate and click on the Fantastico De Luxe Icon
• Step 3: Under the “Content Management” section, find and click on “Drupal”
• Step 4: In the right panel, select “New Installation”
• Step 5: on page 1 of the installation process, you will be prompted for the installation directory. To have Drupal installed on your website’s main page (http://www.yourdomain.com) leave it blank else, insert the directory of your choice (http://www.yourdomain.com/forum). Fill out all the required information accordingly and click “Install Drupal”.

• Step 6: A summary of the installation details will be posted. Once read, click “Finish Installation”. You will also see the link to your freshly installed Drupal 6.1.

 Installing Drupal 6.1 – Manually

Manual installation of Drupal 6.1 is not much of a complicated set of procedures. Nevertheless, some attention is required for the process to roll on smoothly.

• Step 1: Go to the download section of phpBB website, and get version 6.1.

• Step 2: Uncompress the downloaded file to a specified directory on your desktop.
• Step 3: Upload the extracted files (keeping the directories structure intact) to your web hosting account via FTP to a specified directory of your choice (e.g. /drupal).

• Step 4: Login to your Admin cPanel, locate & click on “MySQL Databases”.
• Step 5: Create a MySQL database and save its name along with the username and password for future use.
• Step 6: Using your browser, go to the location of your newly uploaded files (step4): http://www.yourdomain.com/drupal
• Step 7: The “Database Configuration” page will be displayed. Fill in the database name, username and password. Those are the ones you created earlier in step 5. When you’re done, click on “Save Configuration”.

 Basic Content Management

• Drupal Content Types

The two default content types that are installed in drupal are “Page” and “Story”. The two types are similar in form but have one difference which is that a visitor can post comments on a “Story” entry while a “Page” entry does not allow replies to be posted.

• Site Building

The site building section in the drupal administrative panel is where you can edit the overall look of your website. You can install change the theme, change the blocks positions, create or edit new/old menus. All these options are taken care from within this section to better present your site to your visitors

• Site Configuration

The site configuration section is where the main system settings of your website are fine tuned. You can set actions for your website, edit the date and time, enable/disable clean URLs for your site to be more SEF, etc…

• User Management

Control everything related to your registered users, from default user settings to user roles passing the access rules. Every user can have his privileges according to his username, email address or even IP address.

• Reports

Reports are the essential tools for administrators to monitor the activity of there website. As an administrator, you can view the 404 errors, the 403 access denied errors. You could even use the Status Report to monitor the operations and problems on the website.

 Drupal 6.1: Advanced Features

Themes Installation

Installing themes in Drupal 6.1 couldn’t be easier. All you have to do is this:

• Step 1: Download a theme of your choice to you desktop from http://drupal.org/project/Themes. Please note that it’s a recommended for 6.x version
• Step 2: Extract the downloaded file.
• Step 3: On your hosting account, create a new directory under /drupal_directory/sites/all/, and name it “themes”.
• Step 4: Upload the extracted theme folder that exists on your desktop to the /themes directory.

• Step 5: Once upload is successful, go to the drupal administrative backend  Administer  Site building  Themes. You will see the theme that you have just uploaded, Enable it so it can be used later on. Pay attention that some themes need additional steps to be installed and therefore you have to look inside the folder that you extracted for a Readme.txt/install.txt file for further details.

If you wish to use the newly installed theme, just select it as your default theme.

Modules Installation

Modules are additional plugins that you can install that would add more functionality to Drupal 6.

To install new modules, follow the below steps:

• Step 1: Go to http://drupal.org/project/Modules and download a module of your choice to your desktop. Please note that it’s a recommended for 6.x version
• Step 2: Extract the downloaded file.
• Step 3: On your hosting account, create a new directory under: /drupal_directory/sites/all/, and name it “modules”.
• Step 4: Upload the extracted module folder that exists on your desktop to the /modules directory.
• Step 5: Once upload is successful, go to the drupal administrative backend  Administer  Site building  Modules. Enable the newly installed module SWand then use it freely. You may also note that there are ready installed modules but they are by default NOT enabled.

Multi-Site Installation

One of the most important advantages in Drupal 6, you can host multiple websites under one codebase. The multiple websites can be of same content or even different content and you can all manage them easily.

Implementing Drupal Multi-site:

• Step 1: After installing Drupal 6 and setting it up along with the main domain, it’s time to choose the second domain to be used.
• Step 2: After choosing the second domain, you will have to point it to the root directory of Drupal.
• Step 3: Under the /sites directory, create a new folder and name it exactly as your second domain to be used. (e,g. ../sites/seconddomain.com)
• Step 4: Under the /sites/default directory, a file named “settings.php” exists. Copy that file and place a copy of it under the newly created sub-directory (e.g. ../sites/seconddomain.com/settings.php)

The above procedure will allow you to host the same content of the main site, on another domain. In order to host different content for the second domain, you will have to do some extra steps:

In the settings.php under the /sites/seconddomain.com edit the following lines accordingly:

$db_url = 'mysql://db_username:db_password@db_server/db_name’;
$db_prefix = ;
$base_url = 'http://www.seconddomain.com';

This would finish the multi-site implementation procedures and would allow you now to handle multiple sites using one drupal codebase.

 Backup Drupal

It’s an important and major procedure to backup your website files and keep them in a safe place. In Drupal, that can be done easily. You will need to backup the database and the core files

Database backup:

• Step 1: Login to your hosting account cPanel, locate and click on the “PhpMyAdmin” icon.
• Step 2: From within PhpMyAdmin, choose the Drupal Database.
• Step 3: On the top menu of the database table list, click on “Export”
• Step 4: In the export options, make sure you:
  • “Select All” Tables
  • Check “Structures” property.
  • Check “Data” property.
  • Check “Save as” option

• Step 5: Once you double check that all the options in step 4 are set, click Go and save to the file to your desktop.

Core files backup:

Core files are available at Drupal’s root directory. You should always keep a copy of those files as you may have edited them to tune up your website.