One of the best new features of Drupal 5 is the new installer. I was going to try and amaze you with a 30 second long video showing you how quick it is to install Drupal now but I've decided to slow it down a bit so that everyone can follow along. I'm still going to get it done in less than five minutes though.

Get Drupal 5 (0:23)

First thing to do is to download Drupal 5. By the time you watch this video the page may have changed a little bit but the concept is the same. You go to the Drupal downloads and select Drupal 5 and download it. And it's a really quick download that goes in your downloads folder. And then you need to put it on your web server. Most people will move it using FTP and upload it to their server but I'm actually running all this locally so I'll just copy it into my Apache sites directory. Once you've got it in place the next thing to do is uncompress it, or unzip it. I've got a program that does that but you can also do it form the command line using the gunzip function. I'm also going to rename the directory here to just "drupal-5" so I can find it easier on my server.

.htaccess (1:11)

And then I'm going to show you there's a couple of, well there's one particular invisible file in the directory that you want to be careful if you're copying things around. If you were to uncompress this locally and then copy the files up to your FTP directory you want to make sure you catch that .htaccess file or Drupal won't quite work the way that you want it to. So, just don't miss that one.

The install screen (1:35)

The next thing to do, logically, is to go and see what we uncompressed to see if it works. Here again, I've got this installed locally but you'll probably want to enter the address of your web server here along with any subdirectory that Drupal might be in. Cool. This is Drupal's new install screen. Drupal now prompts you for the mysql or postgresql information along with database name, username ad password right here. We don't have these set up yet so I'm going to set them up separately. A lot of hosting companies will actually provide you with a specific database and specific login information that you should use. If that's already set up you can just enter those in and go to town.

Create a database (2:18)

But we're going to switch over to phpMyAdmin and set up our own database called "drupal". You can actually call it whatever you like but drupal seems appropriate here. We're dropped into the database itself which is now empty. The only user with privileges to access this database is the root user. Since the password will be saved in the settings file within Drupal we can add a layer of security by creating a user that only has access to this one database.

Create a database user (2:45)

We go up to the top level and we click on Privileges and Add a new User. Here again you can call the user whatever you want, but I'm going to call the user "drupal", which happens to be the same name as the database. I'll further restrict access so this user can only access the database from the localhost, this basically means that they can't access the database remotely. Give it a password and I won't select any Global privileges for this user because I don't want them to have access to all the databases, but just our one specific one. So if we scroll down here we can add Database-specific privileges. Our database is called drupal. Here, now we want to have this user to have all permissions for the drupal database. Drupal's install system and also several modules, such as CCK, require write access and alter access to the database so just turn it all on. Now when we go into the database itself you can see that it's empty. There's nothing in there.

Install Drupal (4:03)

We go back over to Drupal and again we get the install screen but now we have the information to enter in.

• Database name is drupal.
• Database username is also drupal.
• And we've got our password all set up.

Under Advanced options you have options for:

• The Database host if you're using a separate server for your database.
• The Database port if you're using a non-standard port for your database.
• And the Table prefix. The table prefix is really important if you're sharing the table between several web applications. That maybe you have several applications that want to create a users table. What you can do is you can prefix all your drupal tables with something. A good prefix is probably something like drupal_ and then your table for users would be drupal_users. We have a dedicated database so we don't need to prefix anything.

And there it is - Drupal's installed. Tadaaa! How long did that take? Hey, five minutes! Perfect.

Create the first user (5:08)

You can now go to the site and create your first user account, which is the super user account. This user has privileges for everything on the site, always. User ID number one. And there you go. Drupal gives you this nasty password for auto-generated kind of thing. Create something that you'll remember here. Scroll down, choose your time zone so your times work right on the site. Submit and off you go. There you go, now you can start creating content and configuring things and all that kind of stuff.

There it is - Installing Drupal 5. Easy.