In order to provide you with the most efficient method of getting everything done, this chapter covered the installation of PHP, MySQL, and Apache in a package called Apache2Triad. As a result, you now have the foundation from which to build a live site in the coming days and weeks. Having taken the time to set up a working development environment, you can be assured that you have prevented any needless waste of time, and possibly bad publicity, by not working directly on a live site.

Now that you have the facilities provided by Apache, PHP, and MySQL installed on your own machine, you are free to experiment and play with your site as much as you want in order to learn your way around. Of course, installation of the requisite technologies is not the end of the story. We also learned how to obtain and install Drupal itself—hopefully, you found that quite easy!

Following this, we noted that from time to time it is important to upgrade Drupal; so we discussed how to implement an upgrade in order to cover this. No doubt everything went smoothly but you can't always guarantee this, so we took the time to also explore some of the more common problems associated with the installation, and set out a process for solving problems in general.

Finally, we became acquainted with Drupal itself by creating an administrative user and posting some content to the site. We took a bit of time to modify the site quite drastically by enabling a module or two in order to observe the effect it had on the live site. Using this, we then talked about the major elements of an average Drupal page.

If you have gotten this far, then congratulations, you are ready to begin developing your site! Its time to get your hands dirty…