Welcome to the Freeola Internet customer support pages. This guide is designed to give some general information about installing Drupal using a Freeola MySQL Database. For more internet help topics please visit our main Support Page.

In order to install and use Drupal, or any other Content Management System, you will be required to have purchased and have access to a Freeola SQL service. This service costs as little as £2 per month for VIP Hosting customers. MySQL is a database utility that is primarily used for dynamic websites. A database of this sort is required to store your content for the installation and running of Drupal.

1. Firstly if you have not downloaded Drupal you can do so from the following location: http://drupal.org/project/drupal

2. Download the latest 6.x version of Drupal, and then extract the file into a new folder on your local computer. You will need a program that can uncompress and extracts tar files. If you don't have such a program, you can learn how to get one on the gzip home page.

3. Start your FTP program and connect to your Web server using your FTP user name and password. If you are not sure of these, all the information needed can be found by selecting 'Options & FTP Settings' from within the My Websites link on your MyFreeola account.

4. Copy the files over to the directory you wish to install Drupal in, if you want to install it so that it appears at http://example.com/ upload to your "htdocs" folder, otherwise for something like http://example.com/drupal then create a folder within "htdocs" and upload into that folder you create.

5. You now need to change the file permissions of settings.php found by going into the "sites" folder and then into the "default" folder, they need to be set to 666. Most FTP programs have permissions options which allow you to enter this numeric value.

6. You now need to create a MySQL database from within your MyFreeola account if you do not have one set up already. To do this log into MyFreeola, click "Go To Settings" next to the appropriate VIP Hosting account, and then click "Edit VIP MySQL Settings". You can then create a database, and you will be provided with your username and passwords in a list below the creation form. Make a note of these details, you will need them in a moment.

7. Now go to http://example.com/install.php (where example.com is your domain name) and click "Install Drupal in English". Note if you installed drupal in a directory within "htdocs" you would need to go to something like http://example.com/drupal/install.php.

8. Enter your MySQL database name, username and password into the "Database configuration" page, leave the "Advanced options" as they are unless you need to add a table prefix. You can then click "Save and continue".

9. Since these details will now have been written to settings.php you can set the permissions for this file back to 644.

10. To configure your site further enter a site name and site e-mail address. Please note this e-mail address needs to be a Freeola e-mail address managed within your MyFreeola account. 11. Now enter your settings for your admin account for managing your Drupal site, set a default timezone, and make sure clean URLs are enabled unless you specifically wish them to be turned off. Then click "Save and continue".

You have now successfully installed Drupal!