By Dash 7 on

Ok, I'm completely new to website development and am trying to set up my first website on Go Daddy using Drupal 5.0. Please forgive me in advance for any stupid questions and feel free to direct me to a location where I can find answers if they are already posted somewhere on the site (I've been looking for about a half hour and have not found any yet). End of Disclaimer, now the question.

Step 1 of the installation (thats right, Step 1 is as far as I got before a question) states that after decompressing the Drupal compressed file to "move the contents of that directory into a directory within your web server's document root or your public HTML directory". What is a "web server's document root or public HTML directory"? Remember, I did put Newbie Alert in the subject!

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

captaindrunk’s picture

captaindrunk commented

A web server's document root is the starting point for any html that is going to be displayed to browsers. In literal terms this is a directory / path on the webserver (/var/www/html for unix or c:\some\webserver\root for windows). A public html directory is a directory for user specific html, in essence, it acts like a document root for that specific user (usually seen as http://somedomain.com/~someuser as a URL).

I'm not familiar enough with Go Daddy to give any details, however as they are providing you a service, they can likely tell you which directory is which.

noraa’s picture

noraa commented

I have GoDaddy and it would be best to just call Customer support and have them walk you through it. They're pretty helpful. Drupal isn't the easiest to get started with, but it can really do a lot, and this support forum is fantastic. Just get ready to pretty much "live" here for awhile. You'll really learn a lot. BTW, it would be best to setup drupal on your local machine first and play with it there. If you're on a Mac, MAMP is a wiz to get up and running, otherwise you have to get under the hood with the command line and stuff, Apache server and PHP. It was too much for me as a newbie. MAMP saved my life. I think there's comparable LAMP and maybe WAMP for windows. Do a google on them. Sorry I can't be of more help.

glendac’s picture

glendac commented

If you are like me whose Drupal site is hosted on a shared web space with a hosting company, your public_html directory would be indicated by a single / in the remote directory window of your FTP client. Upload your decompressed Drupal files to this directory (unless you plan to put it into a subdomain or subdirectory). GoDaddy has a built-in FTP client on the cPanel that you use to manage your web hosting account. Drupal is not one of the add-on applications that GoDaddy allows you to install just by clicking an 'Install' button so you will also be creating and configuring your backend MySQL database from the cPanel.

All of us are Newbies at different points in our learning process!

Glenda