By TomDude48 on

I do a lot of championing of Drupal, and a lot of people I talk to about Drupal are web admin noobs. So the biggest hurdle is a place where they can try out and learn Drupal without getting there own hosting and installation.

WordPress has places you can setup a free hosted WordPress blog and I was hoping to find something similar for Drupal. It looks like the site moobytes.com did something like this, but the site is down now.

Also a good cheap hosting company that will do a one click install for these beginners would be a good alternative. We do our own hosting so I am not familiar with one click installs but I heard they exist.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

throk’s picture

throk commented

I haven't heard of any places.

You may want to search around for "Drupal Sandboxes" but these would probably only be basic un-setup installs.

The problem with a lot of the one-click installs are that they are usually outdated, (ie ver 5 or 4 ), and they most certainly aren't up to date with the current point versions (security/bug fixes).

I think one of the reasons Drupal has been so successful in staying such a rock-solid framework is that there is a barrier to entry, so that only those willing to make an effort will use it. Which has resulted in a better community and better modules/addons. Unlike the turd that is Joomla (shudder).

Best of luck!

Elteto’s picture

Elteto commented

WordPress accounts are easy to set up, because their primary function is to be blogs. Drupal is not just a content management system CMS), but a content management framework (CMF), that is, you can use it to develop a CMS, or turn it into other web applications. It takes more resources for a provider to allow users to set up an entire Drupal site of their own and administer it. There is not much sense in setting up a Drupal site just to say "Hey, set up your own blog here, it is Drupal based." Because really, for an anxious, aspiring blogger, the platform is of no consequence. Plus, allowing each user to try to administer his or her own themes, modules, and even file directories on the server would be a system admin's nightmare.

The service you want already exists. It is called free web hosting. Grab an account, and if it lets you install PHP and MySQL based sites, install Drupal and play with it without the restrictions you would have on a shared, administered Drupal master installation, where you are just a user with privileges respective to that account level. Google "free web hosting" [without quotation marks to get more hits].

If you do not want to mess with installing Drupal yourself (even though its web-based install interface is as easy as WordPress), many web hosts (yes cheap ones, too) offer one-click Drupal installation. Just Google the following phrase, and see the first couple of hits:

"drupal one-click installs" [without quotation marks to get more hits]

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