Installing Drupal on Windows

The best way to familiarize oneself with Drupal is to play around with a local deployment.

For those who are unfamiliar with client-server model, here is what a local deployment means.

Others can skip to installation directions.

• Install a server in your machine locally. This means, only systems, which are connected to your machine in LAN, can access the website.
• Install a Drupal application in the local server. Typically one server can have multiple instances of applications. By applications, I mean, different websites, which can be of different flavors like Drupal, Joomla or CodeIgniter.
• Once you are ready to take your site online, deploy your application on a public server.
• A public server can be obtained by buying it, or getting a static IP for your machine from your ISP.

Prologue

If you are reading this, probably you want to know about how to start with Drupal.

Before going into that lets try to answer a few questions:

• What is Drupal?

It is a content management system (CMS) which helps you create a website with all data stored into a database and display them according to your needs. Other than Drupal, other popular CMS are Wordpress, Joomla

• So why Drupal?

Not only does it give you a lot of features, but also the fact that very little programming is needed to achieve most of the things. So even non-programmers can create a beatiful site using Drupal.

Drupal gives a lot of flexibility to programmers as well. With a little knowledge of php and sql one can come up with complex websites and completely web based applications.

This topic focuses on various such aspects of Drupal and helps you understand it better to fully utilize its features.