Award Sounds Music, Photography & Consultancy

This site is built using Drupal. It's by far the best Content Management System for me. It does everything that I want and more, is low on maintenance and has regular updates and patches. From an application design point of view, I'm impressed with what I see under the bonnet as well.

Drupal relies on having core modules (of which you'll probably want most of them switched on) and contributed modules. It's these contributed modules that give Drupal its power.

Originally I decided not to post anything about the site setup itself, because I wanted the site to represent Award Sounds and the aims of that company. On reflection, since the company promotes knowledge-sharing, I've decided to create an area where you can follow the updates to the site and what they mean, see any pitfalls and whether the results are better. Ideally, you'll be able to use the information to build your own site or join into a collaboration with us for a joint venture or other community venture.

As a slight aside, you may want to understand something about me so you can better judge your potential with Drupal. Doesn't matter if you don't, we can carry on anyway.

Before installing Drupal, I had to find a host. After a few well-answered pre-sales questions I accepted their terms. Beyond the standard questions of whether the host company keeps any domains they register for you and time and terms and conditions to extricate yourself from their grip, some of the more Drupal-based questions to ask are:

- will I have access to .htaccess file

- do they support php5 (actually this isn't a blocker, but Drupal 6 will require it and I didn't see much point being stuck with a host using php4)

- do they have any drupal sites working on the shared hosting platforms?

- do any of those sites have clean URLs enabled and working?

- will I have permissions to lock tables in mysql?

- is mod_rewrite enabled on Apache?

Surprisingly, I couldn't find a list of questions on the drupal website itself. The above is a list compiled from various sources including drupal.org

I followed the steps in the Drupal Installation Handbook. I won't go into them here, they're well enough documented. Watch out for the access denied if you've just created your first user. This did take a while to get around, but works happily now.

Next article will be about the modules I've installed and why I've used them.

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