First off, I don’t have my own personal server. That’s a future project. I already have a hi-spec PC that I was allowed to keep when I was made redundant from my old job. Until I set it up as a personal server I continue to develop on the web and just discourage search engines from indexing my sites until they are finished.
Installing Drupal is pretty easy and is similar to many Content Management Systems. This is how I do it.
- Get a domain name and some server space – I currently use ICDSoft
- Create a MySQL database in the host’s Control Panel
- Download the latest version of Drupal from the website – I downloaded the zip file of version 9.0.7
- Extract the zip file and upload the contents of the folder to your server – this takes quite a lot of time as there are many files and folders
- Visit the site and, if all has gone well, follow the instructions to complete installation
Drupal has some high requirements so you may get some warning messages. I was told to upgrade the version of PHP that was the default on my server. Luckily this was easily done in the Control Panel of my host.
Once installed and, again, if everything has gone smoothly you should see something like this.
As you can see there is an Admin bar at the top – this is because you are logged in. If you visit using another browser the Admin bar will not be there and the “Tools” box will also not appear in the left sidebar.
The theme is the default Bartik theme. I’ll keep that for now, but I will eventually be replacing it with my own theme which I will build from scratch.
There is a message saying that “No front page content has been created yet”. So I guess that’s a good place to start building my site.
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