Drupal 5: How to set up a simple basic site

Let's suppose we want to set up a simple Drupal site with a WYSIWYG editor, with the ability to include on-the-fly uploaded images in our posts.

What would the steps be, exactly, so as to avoid all the common pitfalls still so common in even relatively simple configurations?

Drupal 5.0.x (at this writing at rc1) is much simpler to install and configure than previous versions, but you still have to go through the following steps:

  1. Follow the basic directions in INSTALL.txt in the root directory of the tarball so as to obtain a virgin Drupal site.
  2. Create the first user by hitting "Create new account" under the left-hand side login dialog block.
  3. Make a user who will be the famous "user 1", a user with the name of "superuser" or some such: this user will not be used for day-to-day operations, for reasons of security. It will be used only this once, to do the first few steps outlined here, and then only to update the version and modules.
  4. Go to Administer > Site Building > Modules and enable the following modules:
    • Blog
    • Contact
    • Tracker
    • Upload
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Let's suppose we want to set up a simple Drupal site with a WYSIWYG editor, with the ability to include on-the-fly uploaded images in our posts.

What would the steps be, exactly, so as to avoid all the common pitfalls still so common in even relatively simple configurations?

Drupal 5.0.x (at this writing at rc1) is much simpler to install and configure than previous versions, but you still have to go through the following steps:

  1. Follow the basic directions in INSTALL.txt in the root directory of the tarball so as to obtain a virgin Drupal site.
  2. Create the first user by hitting "Create new account" under the left-hand side login dialog block.
  3. Make a user who will be the famous "user 1", a user with the name of "superuser" or some such: this user will not be used for day-to-day operations, for reasons of security. It will be used only this once, to do the first few steps outlined here, and then only to update the version and modules.
  4. Go to Administer > Site Building > Modules and enable the following modules:
    • Blog
    • Contact
    • Tracker
    • Upload
  5. Logged in as this "user 1", go to Administer > User Management > Roles.
  6. Create the role "admin", which will be used by you (and whomever else you would like to designate as such) as admin on an everyday basis.
  7. Your new role now appears on the page in the table of existing roles for the site. To the right, you can see two operations, "edit permissions" and "edit role". The latter will only let you change the name of the role. You want to hit the first one, "edit permissions". On that page, tick every single check box and hit the "Save Permissions" button at the bottom.
  8. Now create your everyday user. Go to Administer > User Management > Users and at the top of the page, hit the link "Add user". Fill in the necessary info, and check the "admin" role. Then hit the "Create new account" at the bottom of the page.
  9. Carefully write down your "user 1" name and password, and your day-to-day administration username and password. Then log out as user 1, and login with your newly created everyday work / administration account, which will have all permissions thanks to the "admin" role and the fact that all current permissions have been enabled (via the check box) for that account.
  10. You should now see your new username at the top of the block on the left-hand side of the page, and four menu links, "Create content", "My account", "Administer" and "Log out".
  11. Go to Administer > Site Configuration > Input formats and make "Full HTML" the default input format, otherwise you will have trouble with using FCKeditor and IMCE modules (there are security considerations we will deal with later).
  12. [tbd] Install and configure FCKeditor module.
  13. [tbd] Install and configure IMCE on-the-fly image uploading and textarea placement module. (Don't use FCKeditor's image upload, use this module instead: don't forget to configure use with FCKeditor in the settings page).
  14. Make sure you have gone to Administer > User Management > User settings, and enabled Picture Support near the bottom of the page.
  15. [tbd] search
  16. [tbd] cron
  17. [tbd] clean URLs: It is a common mistake to install Drupal (especially when people ftp the whole tree from their windows site, or what have you) to omit the .htaccess file that comes with Drupal. For clean URLs to work, and a lot of other reasons, that file must be present.