In the following few articles I will discus my experience in getting Drupal 7 to play music via the Soundmanager 2 player.

It's Drupal 7 for Music time!

These are my personal notes of the procedure that starts with installing Drupal 7 up to the configuration of the SM2 player. Put here online for my reference and in case they help someone along the way. As Laki used to say: it doesn't eat, it doesn't drink...

First of all, this is intended to light users, who want to make simple or medium sized websites used by a few users. For anything more than that, reading professional literature is the first step:-)

In getting Drupal ready, there are two basic approaches: getting everything done at home, on some kind of local internet environment and upload the site when ready. This is the officially recommended method. I tried a few times to set that kind of environment on my Linux machine, (LAMP) and didn't succeed.

So, I install and run Drupal directly on the web. One can easily put the website off-line while building. But if it is a new domain name - no worries - it wont get noticed until a few weeks later anyway.

Step 1. Get a hosting company that offers MySql databases as part of their services. 

Step 2: Buy a domain name via your web-host. Or create a sub-domain. It usually takes 24 hours.

Step 3: At your web-host, create a new MySql database. During the database creation process, you will be asked for a password - take a note of it. It takes 5-10 mins for a MySql databes to be ready. 

Step 4: Download Drupal 7 to your computer. The latest version of Drupal is accessible via the their frontpage: Drupal.org. Download the tar.gz or zipped version and extract it.

Step 5: Using SFTP connection, upload the whole extracted folder on your server. SFTP is much, much ore preferred then regular FTP these days, as FTP simply sends your username and password unencrypted through the pipe, and today's hackers can easily "fish it". An excellent Open Source, multi-platform SFTP manager is FileZilla.

Step 6: At your web-host, rename your newly uploaded Drupal folder - user your domain name for it. So, on your host there should be a folder called mydomain.com (for example).

Step 7: On your web-host's Control Panel, set your domain name to point to this folder. It takes 5-10 minutes for the actual pointing to take place.

Step 8: On your web-host's Control Panel, go to your Mysql databases management and take a note of the database name, username and destination (some sort of weird url, usually).

Step 9: Finally, in your web-browser type in the domain name of your ne site: www.mydomain.com.

If all is ok, Drupal's installation screen will await, asking you you a few easy questions - make your choices there (username, password, email, language, custom or minimal install etc).

When it comes to your MySql database, put in the details as required; don't forget to click the "advanced" link and put your database's url (instead of "local").

Click the final OK and your bright new Drupal 7 site should be ready for new  modules, themes and libraries:-)

Oh, and some content....

Note that in some cases, on Step 9 you might be greeted with a white Error screen: use the Drupal Forums for help

Next: Basic configuration of Drupal 7 and installing WYSIWYG editor