Feature

You’ve heard about it, read about it, and – if you’re like me – dreamed about it. Well, its time to stop dreaming and start doing.

Drupal 8!

If you have experience building sites using Drupal 7, you’ll be pleased to see that from a site building and administration perspective, things are nearly the same.

And if Drupal 8 is your first Drupal experience, you will be pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to build an amazing site.

Installing Drupal

First things first.

You’ll need a basic set of software installed and operational on your laptop, desktop, or server before proceeding with the Drupal 8 installation. Drupal requires that Apache, MySQL, and PHP are installed and working before beginning the installation process. There are several ways to easily install the required software using LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP), WAMP (Windows), or MAMP (Mac) solutions. Grab Google and do a quick search.

Got it?

Good. Now there are five basic steps to install Drupal:

1. Download the latest version of Drupal 8
2. Extract the distribution in your Apache
3. Create a database to hold the content from the site
4. Create the files directory and settings.php
5. Run the installation process by visiting your website in a browser

For details on the installation process visit http://wdog.it/4/1/docs.

These are the basic building blocks that will provide the foundation for your Drupal 8 site:

1. Users
2. Taxonomy
3. Content types
4. Menus

Creating Users

If your site is simple and you’re the only one who will be authoring, editing, and managing content, then the admin account you created during the installation process may be all that you need. In situations where you want to share the content creation and management activities with others, you need to create accounts for those users.