Hi, I'm a first time user of Drupal, but no stranger to PHP CMS (Mambo, SiteX), My interest in Drupal is largely due to what seem to be a solid set of useful modules and good multilanguage support, without the complexity of Mambo.
I have to say though that my first experience (like most other people it seems) is painful.
Here's why:
The installation instructions, and most of the responses to similar newbie threads seem to assume the following:
- I have my very own server which I am able perfrom command line instructions on
- My MySQL database either doesn't exist, or is exists but is empty
- That i would happily install Drupal to the root directory of my domain or subdomain, using up a precious MySQL database, when all i want to do is see if I can make Drupal do what I need it to do.
In reality and in my experience, the largest potential benificiaries of a system like Drupal actually have the following:
- Some webspace hosted remotely
- FTP access
- No command line access
- PHPMyadmin - THE most popular MySQL database tool available
- An existing My SQL database
- Existing tables in that database which they do not want to screw up by running a script which creates tables without any prefixes