Checking out Drupal 6: Installation

Aside from a little poking around in the past, I'm awfully late in giving Drupal 6 a workout. The reason's been simple: I maintain a small raft of active sites, and these all make use of modules that weren't yet updated for D6.

But with Drupal already on 6.6, it's time to set aside the buggy whip and get aboard this newfangled horseless carriage. A surprising number of modules are now D6-ready; I've got new sites I want to start on, and D6 looks the way to go. Let's turn the crank and start 'er up!

Getting started

All easy and straightforward enough, thanks to instructions included in the installation package, and online at http://drupal.org/getting-started/6.

An aside for any real newbies to this all: My goal is to first create a "sandbox" site – a site for development purposes, upon which I set up all the basics that I know I'll want to use later in "real" sites. This includes:

• Installing and configuring key modules
• Creating a primary menu with basic items like Home, About, Contact, and Links
• Creating new roles for content editor and administrator
• Configuring key input formats

Per D6 instructions, I duplicated the sites/default directory to create my new sandox site directory, and changed the name of the settings file inside. The purpose of my sandbox site, of course, is to act as a starting base for any new site: just duplicate it in the same manner, and develop from there. A new site will need plenty of new custom settings (starting with Site Information and moving on from there), plus further tweaks to the items in the above list, but it's much faster to create a new site from a halfway-configured base than to start from zero.

Translations

I'll likely use a couple of foreign languages in some sites, and want to experiment with the D6 language features, so from the start want to add some languages. The D6 INSTALL.txt file says, "Check whether a released package of the language desired is available for this Drupal version at http://drupal.org/project/translations and download the package. Extract the contents to the same directory where you extracted Drupal into."

This I did, though I'm uncertain of some things: Do I just copy the new directories (with names like ja-6.x-1.2) into my D6 directory? So it appears, but now what? Does this only grant the ability to proceed with further installation steps in the new language, or will this new directory be called upon when it's time to create multilingual content?

I'm sure answers will be evident before long; I'm only scratching my head a little at this stage as the documentation is rather terse. 

The install script

The install script takes over from here, and it's very slick. With one hiccup, possibly stemming from a misreading on my part somewhere: 

The documentation jumps from creation of the Drupal database, to execution of the install script. The latter asks for the database user name and password that you created – yet how, I wondered, is the install script supposed to know where to find the database? The install script would have to request the location (URL) of the database, but I didn't see any such request; rather, as expected, its attempt to contact the database using the user name and password that I supplied failed. 

There's a missing step between database creation and the install script: editing the site's settings.php file, to insert database user name, password, URL, and name as follows:

$db_url = 'mysql://user_name:user_password@database_url/database_name'; 

It's an obvious step to those experienced in Drupal, but if it's in the D6 INSTALL.txt file, I'm missing it. 

Whoops

I started installing and enabling some new modules – and got errors galore! Massive failure! Abort! Abort!

Heh. Looks like while dragging some module directories into sites/all/modules via FTP client, I boneheadedly included a full D6 directory along with the modules. So there was a full D6 installation nested deep within my D6 installation... something made clear by the paths revealed in the mocking error messages, while the cruel gods of recursivity hurled over-ripe vegetables at me.

Simply clearing out that illegitimate directory didn't solve things; the installation process had apparently encoded some of its misbegotten paths into the database. It might be a fun exercise for some to track down and expunge the blips from the database, but with this sandbox database to be the foundation for future fantastic sites, I wanted nothing less than pristine cleanliness. Fortunately, this boo-boo revealed itself early on, so it was no big trouble to nuke the database and start fresh with a new one. 

Problem solved. Move on!

More to come!