Brett Kochendorfer

Recently the library bibliosphere has been chattering about Druapl. Drupal is an open source content management system which many libraries are using to create their websites. One of my favorite and undoubtedly one of the most famous Drupal library websites is from Darien Public Library: http://www.darienlibrary.org/ Drupal allows for a high level of customization on a website, blogging, commenting, and tagging.

I decided to configure and set up my own Drupal website just to see what the back end of the service looked like. This was a rather exciting and simple process. I’d like to use this post to explain how to set up a Drupal testing environment so that you can test Drupal yourself.

1. I am running Mac OS X, so I installed the MAMP stack : http://www.mamp.info/ Mamp stands for (Macintosh, Apache, MySql, and PhpAdmin if you are using Windows it would be called WAMP)

2. Download Drupal : http://drupal.org/ (Do not unzip/install yet)

3. From here it gets a little tricker but hopefully I can explain it. Run the MAMP stack, when it opens it should look like this you want to click on “Open start page”

4. This will load the MAMP stack admin page. Drupal runs through a database, so we have to create a database for Drupal to run in. Select “phpAdmin” from the top bar.

5. Click Databases.

6. Enter a name for your database under “Create New Database” and make sure to select “utf8_general_ci”

7. Click Create

8. Next you want to create a User ID & Password with admin access within your database. Click on phpMyAdmin again and select click “Privileges”

9. Click Add a new user.

10. Fill out the user information page and makse sure to switch from “Any Host” to “Local”

11. Do not change the “None”  button selected under the “Database for user” section. Do not select anything under the “Global privileges” section. Click Go in the bottom right hand corner.

12. When you arrive at the next page select “Database Specific Privileges” and make sure to select the Drupal database we selected.

13. Make sure you select ” SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX and ALTER” and then hit Go

14. Now you want to unzip/unpack Drupal in the htdocs folder within the MAMP folder in your applications.

15. I suggest renaming the folder to just Drupal, it will make the next step easier.

16. Go to http://localhost:8888/drupal/ and follow the install instructions. Use the USER ID and Database we created. From here you should be able to play with Drupal!

Here is what it looks like from the Admin End:

Drupal Home Page:

I hope this quick tutorial will help some of you experience Drupal hands on. If you have any questions please feel free to ask and I will do my best to help!

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