Cracking Drupal®: A Drop in the Bucket

B.1. Step 1: Installing Drupal—Easier Than Ever Before

For the first time, Drupal comes with an interactive Installation Wizard that guides you through every step. When you have finished the installation process, a settings file will be correctly configured and will point toward your newly created database, which will be automatically populated with the necessary tables and data. A good reference section on installing Drupal 6 can be found in the Drupal Handbook Documentation at http://drupal.org/getting-started/6/install.

B.1.1. Downloading Drupal

First of all, go to http://drupal.org and in the upper-right corner you will see the Download block. Click on the latest version of Drupal. You will be taken to the Download link. Click Download Drupal 6.x, and save drupal-6.x.tar.gz (where x will be the latest version of the Drupal 6 release) to your local desktop or laptop.

As noted later in this appendix, however, best practice for the Drupal release installation is to grab the Drupal files via CVS, since this makes for super-simple updates and eliminates human and FTP errors entirely, as shown in the following sections.

B.1.2. Unzipping and Preparing Files for Upload

This appendix takes the approach that's simplest for people not familiar with using the command line, in which you transfer all the files to your hosting server using an FTP client. Use your usual file manager to unzip the downloaded file to the desktop or any other convenient folder. There's just one chore to take ...