If you were hoping Drupal was an alien friend of mine that dropped in to spend the weekend partying with me, alien style, I’m afraid I’m about to severely disappoint.

Drupal is an open source content management system. (You’re going to close the window, aren’t you?)

My objective for the weekend was to install, evaluate, and learn how Drupal works so that I might use it for a client project. As usual, things did not exactly go as planned.

Before installing Drupal, I decided it would be best to install it on my laptop instead of my server. That meant I had to make sure Apache, PHP, and MySQL were installed and configured correctly. As Apache comes installed on Macs, that was simple. Even flipping the switches to activate PHP was fairly straightforward. But I hit a huge roadblock when it came to MySQL.

Fast foward 24 hours…

After seemingly repeating the same process forever, much to my surprise, everything started working properly. Was your Friday/Saturday as exciting? I think not. I then did some yoga. Now you’re really jealous.

So as of early Saturday evening, with the weekend half over, I had not even installed Drupal. Just as I had not planned.

Fortunately, installing Drupal was cake. Thank goodness. I played around with it Saturday night. And after nearly a whole day messing around with it Sunday (today), and reading documentation, I think it will meet my needs, and very likely exceed them.

Overall, a success. And it’s still nine minutes before midnight. Perhaps time for a martini…