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Learning the Hard Way: Installing Drupal on XP

Open Source on Closed Source. Probably a bad idea from the start.

Installing Drupal hearkened back to the old days of computing. Way too much jargon and far too little push-a-button-and-it-works. But I'm sold on the Drupal. If I wasn't, I wouldn't have made it through the past two hours trying to install it (I'm tempted to say her here, which suggests a certain love-hate relationship is already evolving).

Drupal installations should be straight forward. Lullbot manages the whole install in one five minute video that I would highly recommend. My installation took significantly longer.

LESSONS LEARNED
GOTCHA #1
MySQL - At least in my instance the directions for setting permissions given in INSTALL.mySQL.txt were not sufficient to allow the database creation scripts to run.

Command provided in INSTALL.mysql.txt:
  GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER, CREATE
TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES
ON databasename.*
TO 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Command that fixed it:
  GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON databasename.*
TO 'username'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'password';

Maybe I mistyped, but if I did, I mistyped several times as I repeated the directions more than once.


GOTCHA #2
This one was painful. I use Firefox almost exclusively, but in hoping to find a Windows-specific permissions error messages I switched over to IE in the previous step. Because when you create the first super-administrator account IE7's firewall blocks Drupal's reply with the default super-administrator password. As a result I was stuck on this screen for 90 minutes. I'd enter the information and screen would just postback blank.

I googled everything I could think of:
  • first user account nothing happens drupal
  • cannot get password for first account drupal
  • can't get password for administration account drupal 5
  • can't create first user drupal
  • show users mysql
  • http://localhost/drupal/index.php?q=user/register
  • cannot admin account drupal
NOTE: Included here in hope this may lead another lost soul to the light.

And finally I found the answer on the drupal Forums in one of tens of entries on roughly the same problem. It wasn't base URLs, it wasn't Apache settings (I'm on IIS)... it was Internet Explorer 7!

Internet Explorer blocking open source software. There's some irony in here somewhere I'm sure.
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