Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition: You don't need to be a techie to build a community-based website for your school. With this guide to Drupal you'll be able to create an online learning and sharing space for your students and colleagues, quickly and easily. , Second Edition

To get Drupal up and running, you will need all of the following:

For building sites, either a web host or a local testing environment will meet your needs. A site built on a web-accessible domain can be shared via the Internet, whereas sites built on local test machines will need to be moved to a web host before they can be used for your course. The process of backing up and moving sites is covered in Chapter 15, Backup, Maintenance, and Upgrades.

The domain is the address on the Web from where people can access your site. If you are building this site as part of your work, you will probably be using the domain associated with your school or organization. If you are hosting this on your own server, you can buy a domain for under US $10.00 a year. Enter purchase domain name in Google, and you will have a plethora of options.

Your web host provides you with the server space on which to run your site. Within many schools, your website will be hosted by your school. In other environments, you might need to arrange for your own web host by using a hosting company.

In selecting a web host, you need to be sure that they run software that meets or exceeds the recommended software versions.

Your web host should also offer FTP access to your web server. You will need FTP (or SFTP) access in order to upload the Drupal codebase to your web space. Shell access, or SSH access, is not essential for basic site maintenance. However, SSH access can simplify maintaining your site, so contracting with a web host that provides SSH access is recommended.

Alternatively, you can set up a local testing environment for your site. This allows you to set up Drupal and other applications on your computer. A local testing environment can be a great tool for learning a piece of software. Fortunately, open source tools can automate the process of setting up your testing environment.

PC users can use XAMPP (http://www.apachefriends.org) to set up a local testing environment; Mac users can use MAMP (http://www.mamp.info).

If you are working in a local testing environment set up via XAMPP or MAMP, you have all the pieces you need to start working with Drupal: your domain, your web host, the ability to move files into your web directory, and phpMyAdmin.

There are many different ways to install Drupal. People familiar with working via the command line can install Drupal very quickly without an FTP client or any web-based tools to create and administer databases.

The instructions in this book are geared towards people who would rather not use the command line. These instructions attempt to get you through the technical pieces as painlessly as possible, to speed up the process of building a site that supports teaching and learning.

The following steps will get you up and running with your Drupal site. This quick-start version gives an overview of the steps required for most setups. A more detailed version follows immediately after this section.

Once you are familiar with the setup process, installing a Drupal site takes between five to ten minutes.

This version goes over each step in more detail and includes screenshots.

In Chapter 3, Getting Started, we will look at the functionality of Core Drupal. In preparation for that section, we will look at the modules that come with core Drupal.

For a full description of the modules included in Drupal core, see http://drupal.org/node/1283408.

To see the modules included in Drupal core, navigate to Modules or admin/modules.

As shown in the following screenshot, the Standard installation profile enables the most commonly used core modules. (For clarity, we have divided the screenshot of the single screen in two parts.)

Within your Drupal site, you can use roles to assign specific permissions to groups of users. As described in the brief glossary in Chapter 1, Introducing Drupal, Drupal comes with two default roles: the anonymous user and the authenticated user. Anonymous users are all people visiting the site who are not site members; all site members (that is, all people with a username and password) belong to the authenticated user role.

To assign rights to specific roles, navigate to People | Permissions | Roles or admin/people/permissions/roles.

As shown in the preceding screenshot, click on the edit permissions link for authenticated users.

Assign authenticated users the following rights:

In this chapter, we installed the core Drupal codebase, enabled some core modules, and assigned rights to the authenticated user role. We are now ready to start building a feature-rich site that will help support teaching and learning. In the next chapter, we will take a look around your new site and begin to get familiar with how to make your site do what you want.