Setting Up Drupal: How To Write an Epic Story About a Mundane Easy Task

So Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols says Drupal is hard to install. I disagree: its hard to design a good looking site; its hard to write content that people bother reading; its hard to organize content so people can find it; its hard to focus your mind on key features, and avoid making your website a portal O' bloat packed with features that serve no particular purpose.

Its particular hard to keep your site up to date. I swear that staying up with, and enduring major updates is about as difficult as quiting smoking AND starting to floss. Moreover getting 12+ sites to behave well when running off of one codebase with 8 different admins -- most of whom may not know what goes on behind the interface -- is a constant battle of the wits -- mainly with me, myself, and my ingenious stupidity.

But installing drupal? Hard? I doubt it. Especially considering the judgement in question is coming from a reviewer who writes things like,

"Now, if I had been doing this in a business setting, I would have used either SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) or RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux). I run both of them in my office. But, I wanted to see if I could do this on a "free as in beer" distribution, so I went with OpenSUSE."

Face it, anyone who uses Linux as their desktop, and is familiar enough with its distrubutions (which are frankly more fragmented, and numerous than the sects of Christianity); they tend not to merely tolerate complex tasks -- they thrive upon complexity, and by all means seem to openly seek it.

That is why this article struck me as odd. The vast majority of it discusses all of these bizarre additional configurations, steps, and hangups which I've never experienced setting up a drupal site. And I long ago lost count of how many drupal sites I've setup. In fact, just today I installed drupal on a emulated server on my windows laptop -- and its running MySQL 5 and PHP5. The only thing that doesn't work is email blasts. It took me 10 minutes to do. And we're talking wrong OS, wrong MySQL, and wrong PHP versions. So here was my epic today:

1. I unzipped into the emulated htdocs folder

2. I executed one sql file

3. I wrote the database name and password into the configuration file, and wrote "http://localhost" as the URL.

Boom, I'm ready to start the real challenge: creating, and organizing content and packaging into a design; the goal being a site that is worth the effort of putting up in the first place. That my friends, is an epic.

As far as the difficulties our poor reviewer is having, I think they say a lot more about the weaknesses of linux in terms of practicality, than they do about the difficulty of installing drupal. (And no, I'm no friend of Microsoft OR apple).

(via Bert Boerland