The Diary of a madman - or at least how he created this website

Submitted by gareth on Sun, 26/07/2009 - 10:06

OK, First proper article:

How to create a drupal webite

There are plenty of places to go to get really good coverage of how to install drupal, so I won't go into too much detail and if I find that a) people read this and find it useful or b) people ask me to, I'll come back and cover it in more detail.

In the meantime some places to check out are:

Getting Started

OK first things first get over to drupal.org and download the latest version of drupal.

Whether you choose drupal 5 or 6 is entirely up to you. I find that that there are more modules or add ons for drupal 5 and not all of them have been fixed to work with drupal 6, but I prefer 6 as the modules on the whole feel a bit more slick.

My recommendation would go along with drupal's Best practices and plan your site. Have an idea of what you want it to do and then have a browse of the modules and create a shopping list of things that may help you do them. Note down whether the modules you want are released for 5 or 6 and at what stage of development the module is. You will find that they range between Alpha (just released), Beta (some bug fixes and features added), rc (last round of testing) and then various full versions. Alpha and Beta Modules can be buggy but not usually in the main functions, release candidates are better as they are deemed to be ready for distribution. You can chose how early to jump on board with a module.

Once you have your list of modules you may find that you have more 5 only or 6 only based modules listed and that may help you chose.

At this point I'll direct you to the drupal documents to get you started. The Installation guide at drupal.org does a really good job of walking through the installation and configuration to get you site up and running.

The only thing I would say here is that my recommendation would be to stay away from installing drupal on Microsoft's IIS, while can be made to work, its way more hassle than I can usually be bothered with.

Its more hassle than installing VMWare Server or Virtual Box on Windows machine and creating a virtual machine with Ubuntu Server on it and setting up a Basic Web Server that way (I have a tutorial you could follow at howtoforge. You can stop after completing step 16), however if you can, even less hassle is installing Wamp Server on a machine and run your site on that.

Next up will be getting some "Must have" modules in place and then on to some more specialised ones.

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