So you've decided to start building website but you're not sure what program to use. You've looked at Dot Net Nuke but, discovered it's not quite as user friendly as it seemed. A friend then told you about Joomla and upon further examination it's more text oriented and you want to sell stuff on the internet. Well here's Drupal, easy enough to use, modify, and install. If you follow these simple steps everything should go smoothly.

So let's get started, the first thing is to do before we download Drupal is make sure we have a web server, code execution engine (PHP), and MySQL. To start off we need a web sever, now if you don't have web hosting don't worry, you can install Drupal on a localhost and later transfer it to a web server. For the purpose of this install we are going to put it on a localhost. Next we need an execution engine (PHP). To accomplish this we need a program like Visual studio but not everybody has the money to own such a program. One thing you can do is go to Microsoft's website ( http://www.microsoft.com/express/ ) and download the SQL Sever 2008 express edition. Now if you plan on doing more than just building a web site there are other express programs you can get for free. The only thing that makes the express editions different than regular Visual Basic package is that all of the components are bundled and the express is not. Other than that you have nothing to worry about.

The next thing on our list is an execute engine (PHP), this can be obtained through WAMP (http://www.wampserver.com/en/). With this download you get the PHP engine, Apache, and a SQL manager you need.

Once you have those installed on your system then it's time for Drupal. You can download Drupal from ( http://www.drupal.org/ ), the official Drupal website. One thing you will notice is just how easy it is to install Drupal than it is to install Joomla.
Realize that the hardest thing about Drupal is getting it setup on a local host, once you have done that everything else is easy.

Now after all this you may be telling yourself this look an awful like the Joomla installation. That's because it is, you going to install Drupal just like you did Joomla. Don't worry if you plan on running both Joomla and Drupal on a local machine. I will walk you through on how to have both setup in WAMP.