Building Church Websites with Drupal (Installation)

In the first post of this series, I discussed the initial steps towards setting up your own church website using Drupal.  Specifically, I showed how to get your own domain name and webhosting set up.  By following those steps, you would have your own domain name and server space, but you would not have any actual site to display your church's information.  This is where the Drupal content management system will save the day, providing a system that can fully manage pages, calendars, users, media, files, etc.

Download Drupal "Core"

Before you can create your Drupal site, you must download the files that comprise Drupal from drupal.org.  These files are called "Drupal core", due to the fact that they are required for Drupal installation to work properly.  You might wonder what these files are...  For the most part the files contain lots of PHP code that is executed when people visit and interact with your site.  There are also Javascript files, image files and more, but the bulk is simply PHP code.

You might also be wondering what version of Drupal to download.  In this series of posts I will attempt to stay version-agnostic so that readers can use this information for running a Drupal site on version 5.x, 6.x, 7.x, etc.  At the time of writing, the latest version is Drupal 6.

Once you download Drupal core to your computer, you will need to decompress the files.  The core is provided as a "tarball" file with the file extension ".tar.gz".  I remember when I first started with Drupal, this was quite confusing to me, as I had no idea how to get the actual files out of such a strange format.  This is where a program called "7-Zip" comes in very handy.  With this program you can turn the "tar.gz" file into a "tar" file, and then turn the "tar" file into a normal file directory.

Now that you have the files all ready, I will direct you to the Drupal homepage for further directions on how to install Drupal 5 or Drupal 6.  Along the way you will need to create a MySQL database.  This is usually made easy for you by your webhost.  It is in this database that the majority of your site's information, content, etc. will be stored.

If you have any troubles getting Drupal installed on your server, you should probably read the Drupal documentation carefully.  If you still do not find an answer to your question, then I recommend hitting up the Drupal forums.  Typically your question will be answered quickly.  If you still do not get an answer or are confused about this step, you can contact me here at Red Leaf Media, and I can do some consulting to get you up and running.

A Few Notes About Installation

I want to emphasize a thing or two about Drupal installation that I feel are extremely important.  The first point of emphasis is that the first user account that you create on your site will be the site "super user".  That username will be able to do virtually anything, and should be used when making future system updates.  I recommend not tying this username to a specific person.  For example, I do not make this username "mike" on the sites that I create.  The username should probably be something like "admin".  Do not make this username's password easy to guess, and please ensure that you do not forget the password.

I also want to ecourage you that although Drupal may not look like much after installation, it truly is one of the most powerful and flexible systems for managing your site's content...as I hope to convince you in future posts.  It is easy to get discouraged when the basic Drupal install looks very plain and customizing it to your needs seems very daunting.  Hopefully I can encourage you with future posts to see exactly how Drupal can bend to your specific needs and become exactly what you want and need in a website.