Installing and Configuring Drupal 6.1

By Michael J. Ross
2008-03-24


Configuring Drupal

Your site's Web server name will default to whatever value you specified earlier. The configuration screen notes that the site e-mail address is the one that will be used to send automated administrative messages, e.g. sign-up confirmations to users. Hence, be sure to use an e-mail address based upon your Web site's domain, to minimize the odds of any of those messages being flagged as spam. For Drupal installations on a local Web server only, this is not applicable.

For your administrator account, enter a name, an e-mail address, and a password. The administrative address is not shown to site visitors. As you type in your new password, its security strength will be displayed dynamically. If you want to create a strong password, include mixed case characters and punctuation symbols. The Drupal time zone will default to that of your server. By default, clean URLs are not enabled, but can be enabled using configuration settings later.

As the administrator, you will be notified of updates to Drupal by default, which can reduce the chances of your site becoming a victim of recently uncovered security problems. But if your Drupal site is behind a firewall, then choosing to have Drupal constantly checking for product updates will cause it to load pages quite slowly. Thus it is advisable to disable automatic update checking, and simply perform manual updates as part of your administrative routine.

In our example, the installation process completed successful, despite the warning message shown in the figure above, which is caused by the local Web server not having an e-mail server. If you are setting up Drupal on a local server only, you can ignore this.

After you click on the link "your new site", at the bottom of the installation text, you will be forwarded back to your new Drupal Web site's homepage, index.php.

As seen in the figure above, Drupal advises you to login as the administrator. You can then make further configuration changes, enable additional functionality via modules, modify the appearance of your site using themes, and start adding some content.

Tutorial Pages:
» Installing and Configuring Drupal 6.1
» Drupal
» System Requirements
» Downloading Drupal
» Installing Drupal
» Configuring Drupal
» Administering Drupal
» Basic Site Customization
» More Resources

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