John Thomas wrote:

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Does anyone have experience of drupal installation under CentoOS-5.3 with MySQL database preferably accessed through phpMyAdmin.

I want to install drupal more or less as an experiment, and I'm looking for a 1- or 2-page document that just lists precisely what steps to take.

I believe RPMForge offers Drupal 5 and 6 http://packages.sw.be/drupal6/

Sorry, I should have made myself clearer. Drupal-5 is available on EPEL, so it can just be yum-installed. The question is, what to do after that? Eg is it a good idea to create a user drupal who will own the database one has to create?

John Thomas wrote:

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Sorry, I should have made myself clearer. Drupal-5 is available on EPEL, so it can just be yum-installed. The question is, what to do after that? Eg is it a good idea to create a user drupal who will own the database one has to create?

No need to create a user Drupal at the OS level.

You need to create a database and a database user/password. The database/user/password go into the settings.php file.

I understand that that is the theory, but it is clear from a quick google for "drupal installation" that many people apart from me do not find it that simple.

The fact is, there are a dozen points where there is some ambiguity, in the absence of precise instructions.

For example, I created a directory /etc/drupal/sites/www.gayleard.com with my settings.php it in, as did several of the tutorials I visited. But I get error messages in /var/log/messages telling me that sites/default cannot be read.

That's just an example. As I say, there are several other points of ambiguity. If only the so-called tutorials and howtos just listed the exact commands they gave.

There is a Drupal support list too, which may be more appropriate at some point.

I did indeed ask on http://drupal.org/forum, but just got replies saying that it was easy. Not one person listed a single command they gave.

John Thomas wrote:

Oh, and you should probably use Drupal 6 unless you have a very specific reason.

Thanks for your response.

I'm using Drupal 5 because that is what I get on my CentOS-5.3 system by "sudo yum install drupal". I don't want to get involved in anything more complicated than that.

I'm not a serious drupal user. I saw a recommendation on a local Linux group, and thought I would see what it was like.

I have a very simple web-site, which I would like to improve, and it seemed possible that drupal might be useful in this regard.

In my view, the installation instructions at http://drupal.org/getting-started/5/install are not very good. It would be much better if the instructions just gave the precise commands given by one person which worked for him/her .

For example, it is not at all clear, to me at least, what username and databasename are to be used. If it does not matter they should say so. It would be even better to give concrete names and add afterwards that it does not matter which are chosen.

Now I have re-installed drupal on my CentOS-5.3 box, and gone through the installation process again.

I am told after jumping through several hoops "Congratulations, Drupal has been successfully installed. Please review the messages above before continuing on to your new site." I removed write permissions from /etc/drupal/default/settings.php as suggested, and click on "your new site", which takes me to http://www.gayleard.com/drupal/, where I am invited to login. I do not recall ever being asked for a drupal username or password, except for those I gave for the drupal database. But when I give these I am told, "Sorry, unrecognized username or password. Have you forgotten your password?" On clicking on the last sentence I am asked for my username or email address. I don't recall ever giving an email address for drupal, but I give one now, and click on "Email new password".

I wait for my mail to come in, but nothing about drupal arrives ... Who is meant to be sending me this email?

What a shambles ...

John R Pierce wrote:

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"Congratulations, Drupal has been successfully installed.

Please review the messages above before continuing on to your new site." I removed write permissions from /etc/drupal/default/settings.php as suggested, and click on "your new site", which takes me to http://www.gayleard.com/drupal/, where I am invited to login. I do not recall ever being asked for a drupal username or password, except for those I gave for the drupal database. But when I give these I am told, "Sorry, unrecognized username or password. Have you forgotten your password?" On clicking on the last sentence I am asked for my username or email address. I don't recall ever giving an email address for drupal, but I give one now, and click on "Email new password".

IIRC, when you first install it, you register a new account and this account #1 becomes the 'webmaster' account with master privileges. I often call it webmaster.

Thanks for your response.

But as I mentioned, I installed drupal by "sudo yum install drupal", and was never asked to register an account. I'll see if I can deduce from the MySQL database what name and email address have been assigned.

John R Pierce wrote:

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IIRC, when you first install it, you register a new account and this account #1 becomes the 'webmaster' account with master privileges. I often call it webmaster.

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But as I mentioned, I installed drupal by "sudo yum install drupal", and was never asked to register an account. I'll see if I can deduce from the MySQL database what name and email address have been assigned.

no, I mean from the web interface.... go to that default webpage, and use the 'create new account' function thats there. the first account thats created is user #1, and is the drupal equivalent of a superuser.

I found in the end the bizarre cause of my problem. When I looked at the MySQL table drupal.users (my Drupal database is called drupal) I found that I was entered as user #2, a strange alien being entered as user #1, and so I presume the administrator.

I take it some hacker has a program that looks for drupal sites, and managed to get in between the time I installed drupal and the time I logged in. (Only a couple of minutes, as I recall.) I tried deleting this user, and moving myself up, but apparently it was too late. I kicked myself for not making a note of the intruder, or the email address they gave.

In any case, when I yum-deleted drupal, and deleted the drupal databse, and started again, it all worked fine.

Honestly, I think you would then be better off with something else. Drupal is one of the more powerful, but also more complex CMS systems available.

I strongly agree with this statement. I was using Drupal for my personal and business websites, but the complexity (the not exactly intuitive interface, to be exact) was more bother than it was worth in my case.

I now use CMS Made Simple for my business site and Wordpress for my personal blog.

Here are the websites just so you can see a live example:

Business: http://www.eifel-consulting.biz Personal: http://www.galitz.org

--------------------------------- Geoff Galitz Blankenheim NRW, Germany http://www.galitz.org/ http://german-way.com/blog/

Rainer Duffner wrote:

Wordpress ist good and simple to setup. I'd consider it also for websites more complex than my simple blog.

I've found this comparison of Drupal and WordPress rather odd. Surely they are very different animals? Admittedly, I don't really know what Drupal can do.