User Guide - Drupal
- 22/02/2008 4:13 PM
Applicable Plans: All Standard VPS, All Advanced VPS, all Premier VPS (CentOS 5 plans)
Drupal is free open source software that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a web site. Tens of thousands of people and organizations have used Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including
- Community web portals
- Discussion sites
- Corporate web sites
- Intranet applications
- Personal web sites or blogs
- Aficionado sites
- E-commerce applications
- Resource directories
- Social Networking sites
- Content Management Systems
- Blogs
- Collaborative authoring environments
- Forums
- Peer-to-peer networking
- Newsletters
- Podcasting
- Picture galleries
- File uploads and downloads
Requirements
Drupal must be installed in your VPS service. This can be done by selecting it when you order the eApps VPS hosting service or by installing it using the Control Panel after the service has been provisioned. To see if Drupal is already installed login to your Control Panel and click on the All Applications icon. If it is not in the installed list, you may install it by clicking on the Add Application icon from the System tab and selecting Drupal then clicking Next.Activating Drupal for your Sites
Even though Drupal is installed in your VPS subscription it is not enabled for your site(s) yet. The reason for this is because you may want Drupal to only be activated for some of your sites. To enable Drupal for a site, click on the Site tab, click on the Drupal icon, then click the Disable button, then the Enable button. Once you click this sequence Drupal will be installed for that site. This step must be repeated for each site for which you want to to use Drupal.By default, Drupal will be installed at http://yourdomain.com/drupal, where yourdomain.com is the domain name for the site you have activated Drupal for. If you want to set up Drupal as the default page for your site, do the following, from the Site tab.
Website Settings > Custom Settings > Edit
Now add this line:
DocumentRoot /home/adminuser(defaults-to-webadmin)/yourdomain.com/html/drupal
Save and check your new site. The Drupal page should display at http://yourdomain.com.
IMPORTANT: When you activate Drupal for your first site, you should immediately create your Administrator login as explained in the next section.
Accessing Drupal as Administrator
Once you activate Drupal, you must create your Administrator login user. To give you more flexibility, you will be able to specify your own Administrator profile information. Go to http://yourdomain.com/drupal and proceed as instructed.Drupal Security Alerts
All Drupal users are encouraged to sign up for the Security Alerts from Drupal.org. This will keep you abreast of any reported Drupal vulnerabilities. Knowing this information can help you to make sure your Drupal installation and modules are up to date and secure. eApps also monitors these Alerts and will take action on them as required.
To sign up for these alerts, create an account at Drupal.org, and in your account settings you can subscribe to the Security Newsletter.