Drupal is one of the most popular content management systems out there and allows individuals and communities to easily publish, manage, and organize a wide variety of content on a website. Hundreds of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal, and now it’s accessible to millions of Windows users too.
Sites like The Economist, Examiner.com and the White House are using it – so we’ve got a simple tutorial that shows you how to get up and running in minutes.
We’re going to kick off with a very simple overview of how to get a Drupal project up and running, from scratch. First off – head to http://www.microsoft.com/web/webmatrix to get the bits.
As WebMatrix is basically a package of software including a web server, a database, and programming frameworks into a single, integrated experience – you’ll be asked to download the WebMatrix suite.
Let the magic begin…
This is the homescreen (which you can always disable on startup). Click ‘Site from Web Gallery’ to pick your CMS out of the box.
Here you’ll get to pick from over 30 sites, with one click.
You’re effectively installing two things here: Acquia Drupal (the core code for the CMS itself) and PHP for WebMatrix:
Here comes database setup page. Make sure you remember your passwords – these are vital and you’ll need them when you go to set up your site.
We’ve now got MySQL Connector, PHP and Drupal installed:
So here’s a look at how we manage our Drupal project. We’ve got three main actions we’d most commonly take:
a. Browsing files – actually setting up the pages, content and files themselves
b. Databases – where we’re going to store the actual data
c. Reports – are you making the most of your site? Get in in front of search engines, see where visitors go & do
If you don’t yet have a hoster, click ‘Need web hosting for your site?’ to choose the best deal that suits you. However – for now, we’re going to get straight into building a test site, so we’ll click ‘Browse your files’.
We could pick through a ton of different options but I want to keep it simple so I’ll create a new template:
We’ll call it ‘Hello World’ and make it in HTML.
We’ll throw in some simple HTML so we’ve got something on the page.
To preview the site we’ll go to Run > Internet Explorer. Notice the title of the HTML file matches what I entered before when I chose the file format. In this case it’s HelloWorld.html.
And we’ve got our masterpiece J This is a local preview of the site I’ve built.
To get the site itself live, choose ‘Publish’ instead of ‘Run’ and you’ll be asked to enter your web hosting details (or prompted to choose one if you haven’t already).
We’ll be adding more content here shortly outlining some of the cool stuff you can get up to with Drupal on WebMatrix shortly so make sure to keep checking back.
Why Install it on Windows using WebMatrix?
From Robert Castelo, Drupal Core contributor and managing director, CodePositive:
“Webmatrix makes it easy to install and develop for Drupal on Windows, bringing open source applications to a whole new audience. As Drupal is as much a framework as it is a CMS, including it in the package makes it possible for any kind of web application to be developed on Webmatrix.
Microsoft has been active in the Drupal community for a few years, and the community is proud that Drupal has been recognised as one of the best CMS and development frameworks available and selected by Microsoft for inclusion in Webmatrix.”
It’s an insanely easy way of getting web sites up and running – including everything you need to get started: a server, database and programming frameworks into a single experience. It installs in minutes and lets you code, test and deploy both ASP.NET and PHP applications side by side.
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Please don’t follow anything this tutorial says. It’s so incredibly wrong it’s sad. kthxbi
This doesn’t make any sense
This tutorial is so bad it’s hilarious.
A hello world in HTML? Is it suposed to be serious?!
For those of you left unfulfilled by this article, there’s a more complete WebMatrix tutorial on facebook: https://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=464611057233&comments&ref=mf
Wow. I’ve read bad tutorials, but I don’t know if I’ve read any as aggressively incorrect as this one.
My favorite part is where it doesn’t even matter whether or not Drupal is installed since you’re writing static HTML anyways. Okay, also the word “hoster.”
can I give this a -1?
-10! =( =(
Thanks for the comments – sincerely. As background this was written for new developers using WebMatrix for the first time who haven’t necessarily used Drupal before. As such it’s very high level and a simple background on how to install Drupal using the WebMatrix tool (when it launched in January). Our more detailed overviews can be found at http://www.microsoft.com/web/drupal
As this post was written ~7 months ago I’d love to know what we could do as an updated guide to Drupal with WebMatrix to make it valuable to Drupal developers – andyrobb@microsoft.com or @androidrobb.
UPDATE: Thanks for the feedback around removing the fact you can also do HTML in WebMatrix as it’s not strictly relevant; rather – move past the Drupal installation to actually firing up the app and getting started. Please keep it coming – andyrobb@microsoft.com
Thanks
Andy
Did any one tell me how to configure old droupal data base in web matrix i had several errors. please help me
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