If you've never tried Drupal, rest assured that getting a simple site up on your local PC is much easier than it may seem by looking around on the Internet. There are a multitude of options available, and the process has been simplified greatly with newer versions.
One key to keep in mind about Drupal is that a site on one platform or host can be very easily copied to a different platform or host.
To get started:
- Install wampserver 2.0c from here. Don't install the latest version. Versions of wampserver > 2.0c have an incompatibility with Drupal 6 that is not going to be fixed until Drupal 7 comes out.
Note: the default installation of wampserver only allows access from your local PC. You must check the "Put Online" option of the tray icon to access your server from the network. - Activate the "mod_rewrite" feature of Apache by clicking the wampserver tray icon and selecting Apache->Apache modules->rewrite_module.
- Click the wampserver tray icon and select phpMyAdmin. Use the privileges page to create a new user with ALL privileges, and the "Create new database" button to create your database (instead of the command-line stuff).
- Use the wampserver to open your www directory. Rename the index.php to index_wamp.php so you won't lose it when you install Drupal in that folder.
- When unzipping Drupal, just put the files and folders into the www directory.
- Download and install Drupal 6 following these steps. Use the database and user you just created. Since you've installed Wamp, you can ignore the stuff about Linux, etc.
- UPDATE: I now strongly recommend installing a Drupal-ready "stack", such as the ones freely available from Bitnami. This allows you to be productive much sooner than the steps I used to go through.
- Once you have a basic site, read through the "Drupal Cookbook" and try out the ideas you find there.
- The first add-on modules you should work to install and understand are TinyTinyMCE and IMCE. These allow you to create pages without having to enter raw html and to easily upload and attach images to your pages. Seems simple, but core Drupal does not include this.
- Next on the understanding list would be Views, then CCK. These are where the real power of Drupal starts to show up. You'll need to invest a bit of time to understand what they're all about, but it's worth it.
- When you're ready to add more functionality, start by seeing what modules other people are using at DrupalModules.com. The reviews there have been very useful to me.
- To "go live", first save your site using Backup Migrate.
- Then, find a host that speaks Drupal. I use DreamHost, but will likely use HotDrupal for my next site(s). DreamHost has great file access and tremendous storage, but is definitely slower for MySQL access.
- Create a very basic site on your host, copy over your add-on modules, activate Backup Migrate, and restore your saved site.