In last week's episode, we learned that our beloved main character had toiled through the dreaded process of reviewing and evaluating a number of CMS / Content Publishing systems in his quest to find the perfect system for his new project. From a long list of candidates, four finalists were chosen to go to the final rounds and the rest were sent home with lovely parting gifts. This week, we pick up our story with a hands on evaluation of the first of the finalist, Drupal!
-- Queue the audience, and fade in... --
So now I get to the fun part, the hands on (let's see what this puppy can do) evaluations. As I had mentioned in the first article in this series, I am a novice when it comes to CMS software and the available features. Not novice as in "limited experience", but more like novice as in "Huh? Wow, that's cool!". So needless to say that I went into this with a somewhat vague idea of what I should be looking for and how to rate each system. While I was doing the preliminary research and selecting my top four, I realized that I was also defining my software requirements for the site. Not best practice, yes I know, but since my experience with content management was deficient, I had to improvise a bit and cut out some planning to get things moving along.
First on my list to sink my teeth into was Drupal, so let's recap my initial notes: Large number of extensions; good developer and user community; decent themes; looks fairly easy to setup and use right out of the box. Okay, good starting point, so now let's begin expand on this research starting with the installation.
Installation and upgrades:
My web service provider has a very nice version of cPanel X (x3 theme), which has the Fantistico script installer as a part of the default services. The version of Drupal offered by this "one click install" feature was 6.10 and the Drupal web site had recently posted 6.12 with a security fix or two, so here's an opportunity to try an upgrade scenario and I took it. I installed 6.10 using the Fantistico scripts, logged into the newly installed system with the administrator account, ran the cron task, and immediately saw the available upgrade information in the status reports.
So far, so good, and now it's time to check out the upgrade path and the steps required to make it happen. I log into the Drupal project site, and see the download link right at the top of the home page. How convenient! I download the tarball to my local drive, unpack it, and begin to read the upgrade.txt file. The instructions are clear, easy to follow, and have all the obligatory and standard upgrade warnings right at the top of the file. Again, how convenient! Even though I don't have any content or customization in my installation, I wanted to experience everything this upgrade had to offer, so I carefully followed the steps to backup my site, database and all, before proceeding.
I followed the instructions to the letter as if I was updating an active site, and everything went smooth. The only issue I ran into was a file or two in the sites/default folder that complained of access rights. A chmod or two later, and all was right with the world again and the rest of the upgrade went off without an issue.
Now I've gone through a simple install and traditional upgrade process, so there's just one thing left to do. Tear it all down and start from scratch. The purpose of this part of the install was to not use the Fantistico installation method and really see what's involved when starting from scratch. I uninstalled Drupal using Fantistico, verified all the files had been deleted, restored my public_html to its previous and boring default state (index.html and .htaccess files), and ran through the full installation procedures detailed in the install.txt file from the tarball package. I'm very happy to report that the installation process went flawlessly with no issues at all (even better than the upgrade, in fact). The instructions provided, once again, were very clear and easy to follow which made the task seem easy.
A note about installation for non-techie persons -- While Fantistico offers the "one click" install solution, as do other services in other control panels, the manual install is the method I would recommend. If you're not familiar with MySQL, tarball / gZip files, or file systems in general, you can use the installers, but you will probably need assistance when a security update is released to get the upgrade installed. If you're an geek, like myself, you should have no problems whatsoever. For ease of installation and upgrade, a point goes to Drupal.
A side note about cPanel before I sign off. The installation, upgrade, uninstallation, and then reinstallation of Drupal gave me lots of personal time with cPanel X, and I must say that I'm impressed. The file manager is what impressed me the most with it's handling of gzip / zip files, among other things, and I didn't even have to open FileZilla once during the entire process.
Just a quick shout out to the development team of cPanel for their great software. 
Join us again in the next article of the series where I begin to venture into the deep dark caves of the Drupal administrative interface! Catch ya later!