What is Drupal?




Drupal is an open source, content management system that is a popular way to design and create interactive websites. Part of it’s success is as a result that the system is open source. This means that users can learn to develop and create highly functional websites free of charge. In fact, Drupal developers, all around the world, are invited to develop new and more efficient code modules, which can be shared within the Drupal community.
This code, including the Drupal framework is distributed under the GPL (General Public License). The license allows for developers the change the code as required, but credit must be noted to the original coders. This open source system is largely responsible for the continuous development and upgrades to the Drupal publishing software.

History of Drupal

The start of Drupal has been credited to two University of Antwerp students, Dries Buytaert and Hans Snijder. The original idea started after the two students set up a wireless bridge in order that a small group of friends could share Hans’ ADSL Internet connection. Dries soon developed a small news site with a built in web board, this would allow the group to share messages.
Soon after graduation, Dries wanted a suitable domain name. Dorp.org was the idea (Dorp is the Dutch word for village). However, he misspelled it and their domain name became drop.org. Eventually this name became Drupal, which is the English pronunciation of the Dutch word for drop….”druppel”
Rather than selling the software system to the public, it was offered as Open Source and distributed under the GPL mandate. This allowed talented programmers the opportunity to update the system to make it one of the more popular content management systems available to web developers.

Benefits of Drupal

In order for a successful system to gain popularity in the web development sector, there must be features and benefits that developers require. Here is a summary list of Drupal’s benefits in creating a content management web site.

Drupal pros

Easy deployment
Editing tabs integrated into actual pages
Editing content is simple as well
Very flexible in its configuration
Modules are plentiful, free, and suitable for non-profits
Versioning is available
Many high profile sites use Drupal (e.g.: MTV UK, BBC, the Onion, Nasa, Greenpeace UK, Kleercut )
Multiple levels of categories allowed along with easily integrated tagging system
Human readable URLs which are search engine friendly
1 installation allows you to create and manage multiple websites (very handy when creating campaign sites)
Highly configurable user permissions handling

How to Install Drupal

Another benefit is that Drupal is easy to install. There are four steps.
1. Upload Drupal to your server.
Go to Drupal.org and download the most recent version. Uncompress the file. Then upload the file in the Drupal directory to your (Drupal compatible) web server, using a FTP program.
2. Create a database and database user
Use MySQL to create a database. Using the webservers control panel make a database + a database user. Then add the database user to the database with “all” privileges.
3. Edit the file /sites/default/settings.php to add your database connection information.
You then need to add your database connection settings to the file located at /sites/default/settings.php.
Find the line that says:
$db_url = ‘mysql://username:password@localhost/databasename’;
Fill in your database username, database user’s password, the database name, and the database host (use localhost)
4. Create the database tables using the appropriate .sql file in the /database directory
Navigate to Drupal’s /database directory on the Drupal folder your local computer.
Look for the file called info.php
Upload that info.php file to the root of your Web server and then open it in a browser (e.g., http://www.YOURSITENAME.com/info.php). That page will display information about your PHP and MySQL installation including the MySQL version.
If you are using MySQL 4.0 then you will use the file called database.4.0.mysql.
If you are using MySQL 4.1 then you should use the file called database.4.1.mysql.
Go to your web hosting control panel and find PHPmyAdmin.
Click on the tab that says “Import”
Use the “Browse” button to find the correct database file to upload. PHPmyAdmin will create your database from that file.
Navigate to your new Drupal site (e.g., http://www.YOURSITENAME.com/) and you should see the welcome page.
Follow the directions on that page to create the admin account, and configure your new Drupal site.

That’s it! Welcome to Drupal…..

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