Drupal 6 Installation and Configuration - Review and Intro

There is a lot to rave about Drupal 6. The pages have less clutter, thanks to collapsible sections. The installation process has been streamlined, with helpful hints throughout the steps and drag and drop is now available (like in rearranging your blocks).

How easy is it to install and configure Drupal? It took me less than 5 minutes to do it. The steps below assume you already have Apache, MySQL and PHP (AMP) installed. If not, scroll down to the bottom of this post, where I explain shortcuts to getting and installing AMP.

• Overview: The old annoyances and confusion associated with Drupal installation have disappeared! The only task that slowed me down was creating the MySQL database (and even that was easy). There are only 5 major steps to install Drupal 6 and I attach screen captures here.
• Step 1: Choose language. The default for this is English. Choose that.



• Step 2: Verify requirements. This page just asks you for basic requirements.



• Step 3: Set up database. This step assumes you already created the Drupal database in MySQL (instructions are at INSTALL.mysql.txt file). On this page, you type the database name, username and password for the Drupal database.



• Step 4: Install site. You don't have to do anything here.



• Step 5: Configure site. This is the best part for me. This used to cause confusion and tedium (especially that part about clean URLs). Drupal 6 has made clean URLs very easy to configure.

Another great improvement to Drupal 6 is the drag and drop administration of most tasks like users and taxonomy. This will speed up maintenance tasks in Drupal.

How to install AMP quickly. It's easy to install the AMP suite. Just download XAMPP or MAMP and run the installers. Since I use a Macbook with Mac OS X, I use MAMP, which is easier to run on this platform. When I was still a Windows user, I used XAMPP. XAMPP also has a version for the Mac, but I found MAMP much, much easier to use. Get MAMP at http://www.mamp.info or XAMPP at http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html

How to quickly install the Drupal database in MySQL. Creating the MySQL database was actually easy. I just copied the SQL commands included in the Drupal install folder and pasted them in the PHPMyAdmin SQL window. Running this command created the Drupal database.