Events is as easy (or hard) to install as any other Drupal distribution, there is nothing special or expected besides what regular Drupal installation requires. It is a packaged version of Drupal which is available for download from the Events project page and can be installed on your own server following the standard Drupal installation instructions.

  • Panopoly — Events is a Panopoly based distribution which means that anything Panopoly related is also Events related so please look at Panopoly documentation to learn about Panopoly, what it offers and how it operates in order to get familiar with concept and tools.
  • Panels — just as much is Panopoly based on Panels to control the layout, so is the Events. Knowing Panels will help a lot and actually it is not that hard. Learning by doing is prefered way.
  • PHP Memory - Events and Panopoly includes a wide range of apps and modules which can require additional memory. Depending on other processes and current memory allocation, you may find that you need more than usual 128 MB (found on most web hosting shared plans, but some may even have less than that). We'd recommend at least 256 MB of memory by configuring the PHP memory limit on your server. And even more will never hurt.
  • Apps Powered - Panopoly utilizes the Apps Module which leverages Drupal Core's update manager which requires additional configuration to work correctly.
  • Apache Solr - Panopoly bundles the Search API module which provides standard database searching, but can be greatly improved by installing and configuring Apache Solr on your server.

Installation in itself is demanding but keep in mind that having few visitors on site at the same time surfing will also be demanding (depending on server configuration more or less but that is out of scope of this document) so picking a hosting company with good resources will help. A lot.

Other than memory requirement, every server (apache, nginx or some of your own choice) with MySQL or compatible database (Maria, Percona) will do. Again, setting server, domain and other details are something you should be familiar with hosting panel or by command line.

Getting started

  1. Download Events from project page to your server and proceed as you would any other Drupal site
  2. Unpack archive to your public_html or the serving directory for your domain
  3. Setup some database you will use
  4. Assign database user that will have all permissions to use it and note the password you will need for installation
  5. Point browser to your domain and install script will pick up asking for details on language, database connection and then configuring site name, administration account and other Drupal things
  6. Visit your new Events based site and start configuring and entering data!