Lessons In Drupal: How to setup a Drupal install on your computer
I recently discovered the power behind Drupal. I have always known about the Content Management System but have never realized how myself and my clients could benefit from it. This tutorial will walk you through setting up a Drupal install locally on your computer so you don't have to fiddle with uploading to your hosting after you save a file each time. It's much easier to work in your favorite HTML editor and hit the save button and the refresh then page in your browser.
To keep this easy, you should go and download a program called XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html), it is a completely free program and runs on pretty much all operating systems. It essentially installs an Apache distribution including PHP, MySQL, and Perl onto your computer. Once it is installed, simply start the program, which initiates a task bar icon and runs in the background. Don't worry, this didn't slow my computer down (and it's already pretty slow), so I am sure yours will be just fine.
The next task would be for you to go download the latest Drupal core (http://www.drupal.org). Once you have done that, make sure you start all the services in the XAMPP control panel. All the services must be running for you to get Drupal to function properly. Under the installation directory of XAMPP you should find an "htdocs" folder. This is where you need to extract Drupal to. If you put it anywhere else, I don't think you will be able to find it. When you have put all the Drupal files into the "htdocs" folder, open you favorite browser and go to http://localhost, this will direct you to the XAMPP control panel. From here you can access the PHPMyAdmin control panel and setup your database for Drupal. You should know how to do this from your experiences dealing with database driven websites.
After you create the database in PHPMyAdmin, go to http://localhost/yourdrupaldirectory. You should be greeted with the Drupal install page where you input your database information. Your user name is simply 'user@localhost' or just 'user.' The password is what you chose it to be in PHPMyAdmin.
From here you can start to dig in and really work with Drupal. This would be a good practice in creating a site on your computer before uploading it to your web host. However, both ways work and this is a way that I have decided to work with Drupal.
