Open Source CMS Environment
The following ingredients make up the environment of most existing, and all of the popular CMS in use today. The same environment is required for your self-hosted WordPress blog, which is your work bench for the student projects this term.
PHP: Drupal is written in PHP (which stands for “PHP Hypertext Preprocessor”). It is widely used on the internet & known for easy use. Fortunately for us, Drupal handles most complex programming issues, but a growing knowledge of PHP will nevertheless come in handy at times. W3Schools offers a free tutorial.
Apache: the web server, a piece of software used to serve web pages. Apache is the most popular web server on the Internet. You will need to understand the basics of Apache’s functionality, especially when it comes to web security issues. Though it’s not rocket science, and there are plenty of free tutorials for various aspects, this will require some brainjuice.
MySQL: a database management system that is used by Drupal to store all the information on the website, our user content as well as administrative content. MySQL is also the world’s most popular database software – like PHP and Apache, it is Open Source and free of charge, and comes with an extensive documentation & reference manual.
XAMPP: I recommend that you use the free XAMPP distribution to create an environment to test Drupal (and many other applications) on your own PC. It contains, among other things, PHP, Apache, MySQL and the comfortable database interface phpmyadmin out of the box. Having these tools on your own computer will speed up your development work and will teach you the basics better than if you depend on an Internet connection. An alternative to XAMPP is Apache2Triad.
Sources:
1. Mercer D (2008) Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6, Birmingham: Packt.
2. Robbins J, Byron B, Berry A, Eaton J, Haug H and Walker J (2008) Using Drupal: Choosing and Configuring Modules to Build Dynamic Websites, Sebastopol CA: O’Reilly.
Date: June 28, 2009