Drupal in five minutes

Will wonders never cease? I’m helping a friend build a website for his driving school, and decided to give Drupal a try so he could have all the whistles and bells he might want. It seemed a bit like overkill, but it would also be instructive for me and would mean that he could always turn to someone else in future to do the development. The number of sites that must founder because they’re maintained by a friend that becomes an ex-friend….

Anyway, it turns out that installing Drupal on Mythic Beasts’ standard hosting arrangement takes literally less than five minutes:

  1. Download the .tgz from drupal.org
  2. Unpack it
  3. Visit the index of the installation in your web-browser
  4. Put in the details of your MySQL database
  5. Er…
  6. That’s it.

There’s refinements, of course: setting up multiple sites, that sort of thing. But on the other hand, as I’d rolled a Drupal+modules package at work for this sort of occasion, it’s even quicker for me to get up and running with a protean CMS, chock full of the most useful community contributions. If nothing else I’ve now got Wordpress functionality plus, in about the same time as it takes to install Wordpress.

Now comes the hard part, of course: either writing my own theme and functionality from scratch, or editing what someone else thinks passes for XHTML. Ugh, on both counts.