By trachypithecus on

Greetings and well-wishes to all!

I'd like some assistance in setting up Drupal, version 6.2. I am somewhat at a disadvantage, however, as I have never run a server, nor do I have any familiarity with SQL or PHP - as a matter of fact, I have very little networking experience, and no experience whatsoever with website management or scripting languages. I realize that means I have a very steep learning curve ahead of me, but I am more than willing to take the time to learn, and your help would be immensely appreciated.

The ultimate goal here is to set up Drupal on my school's server. However, the tech guy at the school has demanded that I first set up Drupal on my own, figure out which modules I will need, and how I'd like everything to be set up, so that I can instruct him on how to arrange things on the school's server. I have interpreted this to mean that I must thus use my personal computer as a server, temporarily, learn some basic SQL to configure Drupal, and then I can install and try to configure it a bit. I've tried installing IndigoPerl and Xammp, bundles that come with the Apache server, MySQL, etc. and then installing Drupal to the appropriate folders, but I hit roadblocks when trying to follow instructions provided here on the Drupal website, such as "Create a database for Drupal," as silly as it may sound, I haven't the slightest idea what that means! Anyways, my attempts at working with the above software bundles have proven fruitless. I need some ground-up assistance; where do I start?

Even if you could point me in the right direction, e.g. to give me some tutorial websites, I would be appreciative - I have spent all day on this and have gotten nowhere. Thanks in advance.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

Anonymous’s picture

Anonymous (not verified) commented

I use http://www.en.wampserver.com/ , which installs what you need on a Windows computer very quickly.

Then start it, go to phpmyadmin (Just click the program icon in the task bar). Click privilages (Middle of page), add a new user... give them a username (whatever you want, I would call it Drupal for testing to make it easier), type localhost for host, give it a password, and then select the radio button for "Create database with same name and grant all privileges". You are done, so you can select go at the bottom.

Then unzip drupal into a directory in your wamp/www folder.. Mine is found at: C:\wamp\www . Go to it in your browser (easiest way is to just type localhost, which brings you to a page that includes many things, including links to all your directories or http://localhost/DIRECTORY NAME/ . Run the installer and the host will be localhost, the name and the database are the same thing in this case since you created a user and named a database the same name. The password is whatever you made it.

It might be like:
name: Drupal
hostname: localhost
database name: Drupal
password: drupalpass

Or something like that.

You should be able to set it up from there. It might tell you it needs something turned off in apache or php or something. not hard to do, just google what it tells you and it will show you how to quickly turn things off.

That is the best I can offer you for a fast, easy way to do it. Alternatively you can sign up for a free or cheap host and try it online. I use the $10 a year Netfirms max deal for strictly testing (Wouldn't run a full site off here, find a better host if you ever do that). http://www.netfirms.com/max

One other move might be to get the tech guy fired and find a better one. He should be doing this.