Drupal is an open-source content management software that let’s you add features like discussion and news forums, collaborative book and online help to your website. This can be a good tool to add to your Intranet site, as it’s free and doesn’t take very long to set up. We’ve given the software on this month’s CD.
We tested Drupal on a full installation of PCQLinux 8.0. However, you can also test it in a workstation installation if you want, or do a custom Linux install having Apache 1.3.x or later, PHP 4.0.6 or later and MySQL 3.22.32 or higher. Here’s how its’ set up.
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The installation
First find the drupal-1.4.0.tgz file on this month’s PCQuest CD and copy it to your home directory. Run the command:
#tar —zxvf drupal-1.4.0.tgz
It will extract the zipped file and create a new folder called drupal-1.4.0 in you home directory.
Next create a MySQL database for Drupal as follows:
#mysqladmin —u —p create databasename
Here ‘databasename’ is the name of the database you want to make for drupal. Generally you should use the name ‘drupal’ for the database, to avoid confusions.
Now set the database access rights for drupal website. To do so first get into MySQL by the following commands:
#mysql —u root —p
Here it will prompt you for the root password. Just type that and
login.
Now run the following command in MySQL to assign the proper access for the user.
GRANT PRIVILEGES ON databasename.* TO user@hostname IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;
Here ‘databasename’ is the name of the database, ‘user’ is the desired user whom you want to set the permission for and ‘hostname’ is the name of your machine (most probably localhost, if you haven’t configured it). And ‘password’ is the password for the user.
Now it’s time to copy the database file, which is carried with Drupal to the newly created database. For this, change directory to your drupal directory and issue the following command:
#mysql —u user —p databasename < database/database.mysql
Here again ‘user’ and ‘databasename’ are the same as discussed above.
Now set the configuration for the database in the drupal-1.4.0/include/conf.php and change the following line as required for your setting
$db_usrl = “mysql://user:password@hostname/databasename”
All examples words are taken from the previous explanation. To run Drupal over your web server (Apache) you have to configure it a little. To do so, start Webmin in localhost:10000, and go to server and select apache. Now select the default web server at the bottom of the page. It will open up a new page. From here select the ‘Aliases and Redirects’ option and create a new alias by typing the name ‘/drupal’ at the ‘from’ column and the original path of drupal at the ‘to’ column. Now restart the Web server and go to http://localhost/drupal and you will find drupal running.
Now click on the “create new account” link and enter a username and an e-mail address. The first user will be automatically treated as the Administrator. Drupal will e-mail the randomly generated password to the specified e-mail address. Now you can log on through this username and password and manage the software. From here you can create new Stories and post them to your site.
The other person reading your site will be able to submit comments on them.
To administer Drupal, click on the “administrate Drupal” link. Form here you can manage users account by assigning access and rights to different type of users (Authenticated and Anonymous), and can monitor drupal.
Anindya Roy