As part of my graduate assistantship, I am building a website for a project connecting international librarians. However, in order to get started on following my bosses’ specifications, I needed a content management system (CMS) that could handle the work and be easy to update for a non-programmer like myself. After a tip from a close friend, I started investigating Drupal and found out that it is used by the White House and the group that is paying me for my work. With this reassurance, I decided set forth on my journey.
The first thing I needed to do was to learn about Drupal. I choose Teach Yourself Drupal in 24 Hours which is not the best edited book. However, it’s a starting point. The next part was to install Drupal on my 1and1 hosted server. Below are the steps that took me two hours to figure out:
1. Set up a MySQL 5.0 database.
2. Create a folder on your server for Drupal.
3. Download Drupal and unzip it.
4. Open notepad and type in:
register_globals = off
memory_limit = 40M
5. Save the file as php.ini in the Drupal folder on your computer.
6. Open .htaccess
7. Search for “RewriteBase /public_html”
8. Change public_html to the name of the folder you’ve installed drupal in
9. Save
a. Steps 6-9 will also allow you to have Clean URLs. Remember to enable them once the site is online!
10. In the sites/default folder, make a copy of “default.settings.php” and change the name to “settings.php”
11. Upload the Drupal folder’s contents into the folder you put on your server.
12. Follow on-screen instructions. Add the host information from 1and1 as ordered AND under “advanced configurations” in the setup process.
13. In the sites/all folder, create two new folders: “modules” and “themes”
14. Install Pathauto and Token modules and enable them.
15. Go to Administers/Site Configuration/Clean URLs and enable them.
16. Go to Administer/Site Building/URL Aliases and delete any alias that might already be there.
17. Then click on “Automated alias settings” then “Node Path settings”
18. In the first box, I like to put in “[yyyy]/[m]/[d]/[title-raw]”
The dummy testing site can be found here if you are interested in watching my progress.
Good luck!
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