I want to learn drupal. And I am also in a process of developing a site from scratch. I want o try all this in a free drupal web host. CAN YOU SUGGEST ME A FREE WEB HOST WHICH ALLOWS ME TO WORK ON DRUPAL AND MYSQL?
For learning and designing Drupal themes, I would suggest you to install drupal on your local computer using wamp.
I don't know of any free web host sorry. Personally I have an account at dreamhost which allows me to run as many drupal sites and mysql databases as I want without paying anymore, so that's also my dev box.
If you want to learn Drupal, go to XAMPP and download that software. This will give you a complete stand-alone web server on you local PC with Apache, PHP, and SQL. You can do absolutely everything you need to do for free. Once you get the XAMPP server set up, just install Drupal, or any other test site you want. The only difference is, you will access your site at "http://localhost/yourwebsite. You don't even have to have a registered domain. As a general practice, you should never work on developing a site while it is live. Always create a test site before adding the site to the Paid hosting account. I have struggled myself by creating websites from scratch. It was great experience, but with the excellent community driven functionality of applications like Drupal, Wordpress and others, I find it much easier to start with a basic installation and modify the content and images to make it match the look and feel I need. The advantage of doing it this way is that absolutely all of the trial and error in tweaking the layouts and such to be compatible with all the various search engines have already been done for you.
Yes, one clear advatnage of working with XAMPP on your local machine is the lightning speed. It's true that I only develop online and I'm used to wait at least one second each time I submit a page or change a page. But working on your computer it's very quick, can be useful for testing things. True.
Running Drupal locally is the best idea. But using WAMP or XAMP is not always the same as running it in hosting environment where most probably they run stuff on linux. I was always using VMWare to have a virtual server on my PC. It gives you an actual over the network interaction and you can download a virtual appliance image with LAMP. Its fast and will not make your PC running Apache and MySQL when you do not need it. There is a site http://freecms.ca/ where they offer free Drupal play ground, but IDK if they let you really tweak your installation. probably not. But itll be the easiest way to see Drupal from inside. Good Luck. Drupal is a great CMS to work with, even it is hard to learn at first.
Hi thanks for your help. But can anyone let me know how to create a user login in drupal?? I am working on a local server. and i just want to create and test . I am not able to move ahead because of my tight schedule and start my site off. Can some one help me in creating exactly one page- in which a use can login and post an image, a post and allow other members to comment on it.
When you install Drupal, the first user created will be the administrator. Install XAMPP, create a database in phpAdmin (the default user and password will be root). Install the drupal files in the directory of your choosing under the "htdocs" folder in XAMPP, then point your browser to http://localhost/siteDirectoryYouJustInstalledDrupalInto/install.php. It will ask you for the database name, username and password. You will have created the database already. This should get you going. Hope this helps.
I have created my database installed the wamp server and drupal too. I am able to add contents but I am stuck with custommizing the webpages. I mean the functionality.I have posted a new thread regarding this.Hope it helps me.
I would not recommend Godaddy and one.com as hosting for Drupal, Wordpress or Joomla the quality of their service is very poor. For the prices they offer you can find much better ones like people mentioned here Bluehost.