Drupal, the Power Play

Drupal is one of the three most popular Content Management System (CMS) in this planet. Drupal is open source and written with PHP. Ohh, forgot to mention, Drupal is also called Content Management Framework (CMF) because of it’s robustness. In this tutorial we will work with Drupal 7.x version. And Drupal 8.x is coming very soon with lot more surprises. So, get ready to hang out.

Who are using Drupal?
As we already know, the popularity of WordPress, in these days. But, question is who are these crazy people still using Drupal? The answer has given below –

I think you have got your answer. This is just a small number of example, I just picked up with. Drupal is so popular to these giants because of its- security, user handling capability and robustness. But, there is a learning curve to get used to with Drupal. Don’t be scared. I promise, I will make it easy for you. Just keep patients. All beautiful girls are complicated by nature, isn’t it?

What Drupal is good for?
Drupal is good for the following sites-

1. Drupal is good for the sites, which are beyond the basics, means need very frequent updates.
2. Have multiple contributors around the world.
3. Drupal is good, if your site is very interactive like, online newspaper.

What Drupal is bad for?
Though Drupal is awesome, it has some bad side –

1. Need special design requirement.
2. If you think, you will upload your site to the server and you are done for forever.

Installing Drupal
In this tutorial, I will show you the installation process, only. Future tutorial series will come with more Drupal features and development process of this framework. To get start with Drupal we need to go through the following steps.

1. Download and install DAMP stack (Drupal Apache MySQL PHP – stack)
2. Download and import “core” Drupal into DAMP.
3. Run Drupal’s browser-based installer.

Let’s Make Our Hands Dirty

Step 1: Download and Install DAMP stack
We will use Acquia Dev Desktop for our development. It is a DAMP stack and everything is ready to go for our development. Go to Acquia Drupal site and download the Acquia Dev Desktop Drupal 7 version for your operating system.

After download, install it with as-usual process. At the time of installation, it will ask for one username and password. Give these information’s as follows –

Username: drupal
Password: drupal

It will install an Acquia Drupal version with it. We will not use this version of Drupal. We will install it from the core.

Step 2: Download and import “core” Drupal into DAMP
Go to the Drupal home page and download the latest Drupal version.

Download one of these archive formats and extract it. You can keep this folder anywhere you want, in your hard drive. Rename this extracted folder as drupalworld.

Step 3: Run Drupal’s browser-based installer
Run the Acquia Dev Desktop and you will get the following screen –

The green circle means everything is running well. Click on the localhost dropdown list under Go to my site button and choose more. It will open the list of your site you have –

Click Import, it will open Import site screen.

Browse the path where you kept your drupalworld folder. Choose Create new database. Give New DB name as drupalworld. Write Server as drupalworld. Lastly, click Import button.

Immediately, It will take you to the installation page. Keep it as it is and click Save and Continue.

Choose language as English and click Save and Continue. The installation screen will appear.

Then, the configuration page will come. Fill the form as needed-

Site name: Drupal World
Site e-mail address: your-email-address
Username: your-user-name
E-mail address: your-email-address
Password: drupal
Password: drupal
Default country: your-country
Default time zone: your-time-zone

And click for the last time Save and Continue. Done..

Drupal installation completion page will come. It will give you a link called Visit your new site. Click the link and welcome to the Drupal world.

Congratulations. You have installed Drupal in your workstation.

Conclusion
Now, try to spend some time with Drupal so that you can get familiar with it. Install some themes and modules, so that it can freak you out. No no.. just kidding.

Happy coding. 🙂

Drupal, the Power Play