Drupal-0-Matic World

I'd given up on trying to get Drupal installed some time back but with my latest lengthy stay at home I decided to give it another shot yesterday.  Also I saw an advertisement in a local alternative tabloid that needed help from a Drupal developer and that kicked up my interest in the software too.

Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System) which means it's a slug of code that allows someone less than super proficient in code slugging (like me) get a fairly sophisticated web site up and running. One that allows for memberships, varieties of clever themes, ... all kinds of modular do-dads.

At first things seemed less than promising. The newer versions of Drupal and the underlying server packages (either Apache2Triad or XAMPP) had moved away from the examples in the Drupal book I got some time back from Amazon. That book is Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites by David Mercer [Packt Publishing]. After not having much luck with the book's rather brief and ultimately not very useful installation instructions I went googling and finally found what I needed to jump start the process.

This was a video of how to install an earlier 5.x version of Drupal via consulting site on Drupal called Lullabot.  I could tell from the video that the Apache2Triad package would work the best as access to the database configuration tools were handier (for me) using it. (That was one good thing of installing and uninstalling and re-installing both of those server and language packages.  A useful bit of familiarity.)

There have been a few changes since the early 5.x version in the video but I was able to play around and find all the important bits to get the development setup up and running properly.  So today I get to read more of the book and find out if it matches up with the new variant of Drupal (or not).   Tension mounts. 

Drupal-0-Matic World

I'd given up on trying to get Drupal installed some time back but with my latest lengthy stay at home I decided to give it another shot yesterday.  Also I saw an advertisement in a local alternative tabloid that needed help from a Drupal developer and that kicked up my interest in the software too.

Drupal is a CMS (Content Management System) which means it's a slug of code that allows someone less than super proficient in code slugging (like me) get a fairly sophisticated web site up and running. One that allows for memberships, varieties of clever themes, ... all kinds of modular do-dads.

At first things seemed less than promising. The newer versions of Drupal and the underlying server packages (either Apache2Triad or XAMPP) had moved away from the examples in the Drupal book I got some time back from Amazon. That book is Drupal: Creating Blogs, Forums, Portals and Community Websites by David Mercer [Packt Publishing]. After not having much luck with the book's rather brief and ultimately not very useful installation instructions I went googling and finally found what I needed to jump start the process.

This was a video of how to install an earlier 5.x version of Drupal via consulting site on Drupal called Lullabot.  I could tell from the video that the Apache2Triad package would work the best as access to the database configuration tools were handier (for me) using it. (That was one good thing of installing and uninstalling and re-installing both of those server and language packages.  A useful bit of familiarity.)

There have been a few changes since the early 5.x version in the video but I was able to play around and find all the important bits to get the development setup up and running properly.  So today I get to read more of the book and find out if it matches up with the new variant of Drupal (or not).   Tension mounts.