What is Drupal?

Drupal - a free content management system and open source code. Under the management of Drupal, millions of websites operate worldwide. Drupal has a wide range of applications, from creating personal microblogging, to creating corporate multi-dimensional websites. Thousands of expansion modules and the themes for Drupal allows you to create any site you can imagine.

Drupal is written in PHP and distributed under the GNU General Public License. Drupal is used as the control system of at least 2.1% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs, to high end business websites. The system is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.

The standard package of Drupal, also known as Drupal core, contains basic features for a content management systems (CMS). These features include user registration and user management, site menu(s), RSS-feeds, setting up the appearance of pages, and system administration. Standard installation package of Drupal can be used as a regular website, a multi-user blog, a magazine, a forum, or as a social network.

Drupal core includes modules that can be activated by the administrator for the expansion of the site. The kernel includes the basic design themes that allow you to change the look of the site. Color module, first introduced in Drupal 5.0, allows the site administrator to change the color scheme of certain themes via a web interface, without requiring knowledge of programming and layout of the web sites.

Drupal is also translated into more than 90 languages, yours is probably include out of the box.

Drupal can automatically notify the administrator about new versions of core and add on modules that allows an administrator to constantly maintain site security at a high level.

Now let's move onto the next phase in which we will learn to install Drupal.

Installing Drupal

The data you required to install Drupal (summary):

1. The address of the FTP server
2. Login FTP user
3. The name of the MySQL database.
4. The login and password of MySQL database.

The data you required to install Drupal (details):

1. The address of your FTP server. You can get this from your hosting company.
2. You can see the username and password of the FTP user in your hosting control panel or in the setup email sent by your hosting company.
3. The name of the MySQL database you are going to use can be found on the web hosting control panel.
4. You specify the username and password for the MySQL database in the hosting control panel.

Now that you have all the necessary information to install Drupal on a server, you can proceed directly to the installation process:

1. Download the latest version from Drupal site https://drupal.org/download
2. Extract the contents of the downloaded archive into a folder on your computer.
3. Connect to the FTP server via FTP program such as FileZilla.
4. Upload the contents of the folder with the installation of Drupal to an FTP server.
5. As needed, create the MySQL database.
6. Open a web browser to the page on which you make the installation of Drupal.
7. Select a standard or minimum installation profile and click "Save and continue".
8. Select the installation language on the next page and click "Save and continue".
9. On the "Database Configuration", select the database type: MySQL, enter the name of the database, enter the username and password of MySQL, click "Save and continue".
10. Enter the site name, such as "My first site on the Drupal", then enter the e-mail address of the site and login / password for the admin user of the site. Enter your e-mail address for the site administrator.
11. Choose your country and time zone, then click "Save and continue", to complete the installation.

Open your page in a browser. To administer the site, enter your login and password.

Congratulations, your first Drupal website is ready to use!