What is Drupal?
Trying to describe Drupal is a bit like the old blind men and the elephant story. But anyway you look at it, Drupal is awesome!
Drupal is an open-source content management system. It can serve as the platform for many types of Web sites - forums, wikis, blogs, and more.
Originally developed as message board software in 2000 by Dries Buytaert, Drupal (the Dutch word for "drop") has grown through the contributions of thousands of programmers and is now in version 6. Drupal 7 is expected to be released later in 2010.
Drupal is like a Swiss Army Knife - it has lots of tools. The best advice I can give is don't try to use them all at once. Decide what you want to accomplish and then figure out how to get Drupal to do it. With dozens of built-in modules and thousands of third-party contributed modules, there's a vast array of tools at your fingertips. My general approach is to use as few modules as possible to get the job done. That way, there's less maintenance (module upgrades) and fewer chances of conflicts and bugs.
Right out of the box (i.e. after a fresh install) Drupal gives you a great web site.
After an easy 5 minute install*, you could start posting content to your site and have a functioning blog, complete with comments, up and running.
But of course, you (or your customer) will want to customize the look of the site (known in Drupal jargon as the "theme"). From within Drupal's administration area, you can change the colors of the default theme, as well as change the logo and the displayed title of the site. You can also change the theme to one of several provided or download a custom theme from drupal.org or elsewhere. If you know CSS, you can even create your own custom theme.
*How to install Drupal
You will need a server (host) with PHP amd mySQL.
- Download the latest version (6.16) from the Drupal web site.
- Unpack the files and upload the folder to your server. You can name the folder whatever you like, for example "mydrupal".
- Create a mySQL database (using phpMyAdmin) and make a note of the database name, the username, and the password.
- In your FTP program, navigate to the folder mydrupal/sites/default/. There you will see a file named default.settings.php. Make a copy of that file in the same folder and name it settings.php. (You may - depending on your server's configuation - need to set the permissions on this file to writable.)
- In your browser, navigate to your new site (e.g. /mydrupal/) and click on install. Enter the information requested.
