Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Book Image

Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition - Second Edition

Overview of this book

As social networks become more popular, their role in the classroom has come under scrutiny. Drupal offers a wide variety of useful tools for educators. Within a single Drupal site, you can set up social bookmarking, podcasting, video hosting, formal and informal groups, rich user profiles, and other features commonly associated with social web communities. "Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition" teaches you how to create your own social networking site to advance teaching and learning goals in the classroom, while giving you complete control over features and access. Communicate with students, share learning resources, and track assignments through simple tasks with this hands-on guide.In this book you will learn to install and configure the default Drupal distribution and then extend it to include blogs, bookmarks, a media sharing platform, and discussion forums. The book also covers how to organize your site to easily track student work on the site, and how to control who has access to that information. Additionally, it teaches you how to make the site easy to use, how to maintain the site, and how to ask for and receive help in the Drupal community.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Drupal for Education and E-Learning - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Installing Drupal – the detailed version


This version goes over each step in more detail and includes screenshots.

  1. Download the core Drupal codebase from http://drupal.org/project/drupal.

  2. Extract the codebase on your local machine.

    Tip

    The Drupal codebase (and all modules and themes) are compressed into a tarball, or a file that is first tarred, and then gzipped. Such compressed files end in .tar.gz.

    On Macs and Linux machines, tar.gz files can be extracted automatically using tools that come preinstalled with the operating system. On PC's, you can use 7-zip, an open source compression utility available at http://www.7-zip.org.

  3. In your web browser, navigate to your system's URL for phpMyAdmin. If you are using a different tool for creating and managing your database, use that tool to create your database and database user.

  4. As shown in the following screenshot, create the database on your server. Click on the Create button to create your database.

    Tip

    Store your database name in a safe place. You...