Drupal

From Mandriva Community Wiki

Typology

• Drupal is an open software.
• Drupal is an online CMS: the web pages are generated in real time at the reader's request. Text is stored in a SQL database, while pictures are usually independent files.
• Drupal's default language is English. Drupal manages internationalization thanks to a module. The interface has been partially translated into quite many languages.
• Drupal is quite powerful, but not very easy to learn.
• Drupal's interface is HTML, so Drupal works on your web browser.
• Unfortunately Drupal 6 doesn't respect the "One web" principle: two pages with the same content, for instance translations in different languages, or a mobile and a desktop version, are refered to by 2 different URIs.

The basis

Drupal is a set of programs using a database. Your work consists at least in web pages text. It's stored in the database. You will probably have pictures, stored as separated files. You will possibly modify the so-called "themes" (graphical templates), which mainly consist in CSS, pictures and PHP files. You may also modify or even create modules, pieces of programs added to Drupal core. They are also files, which can read and write in the database. The configuration file /etc/httpd/conf/webapps.d/drupal.conf says to Apache that Drupal's files are in /var/www/drupal/.

Installation

Installing the packages

Drupal needs a mail notification system (in fact, it can run without it, but you'll get error messages, and won't receive the notifications by mail.), for instance Postfix. You also need pieces of software to manage the database. So click on Configure your computer (Mandriva Linux control center) → Software management → Install & Remove Software, and choose Drupal, Postfix, PhpMyAdmin and MySQL administrator packages. The installation of Drupal will ask you which database management system and which web server you want. In Mandriva 2009, you won't be prompted and have to install manually a database management system and a web server. I suggest you install Apache as web server and MySQL as database management system. Install Postfix.

Installation process

Drupal's packaging in Mandriva doesn't create its own database. Follow the instructions of Drupal's basic installation guide for a single web site installation of Drupal, except that you don't need to download and install Drupal because you've just done it if you followed the instructions above.

Multi-site installation

This wiki has a special page about Local multi-site installation of Drupal.