Installing, configuring, and theming a Drupal website

Before you start:
You'll need both ftp access (unless it's running your local server) and the drupal login to create and administer a Drupal website. The Database connection user/pass is also required to really have full control of your site, but we won't get into that for now.

Installing, configuring, and theming a Drupal website

1. Download & unzip the latest release of Drupal.
2. Put the files where you would normally put a website on a server.
3. Create a new, empty, MySQL Database.
4. Add a new (or existing) user to the new Database (unless you are going to use the MySQL root login).
5. Make sure the new user has all permissions enabled.
6. You'll need this users username and password soon to connect Drupal to the database.
7. Go to the website you uploaded the files to.
8. Use the database user/login from above & your email (leave "host" as localhost in most cases) to generate the Drupal website.

Now you should have a fresh install.

If you are not very familiar with server side coding (PHP templates and/or server configuration files) or storing, and accessing, content in a Database (MySQL) you will want to stick to the themes folder (sites/all/themes) & make sure not to jack up any of the PHP tags in the HTML templates.

1. Create a "themes" folder in the "sites/all" folder.
2. Download, unzip, and add the Framework theme to the "sites/all/themes" folder that you created.
3. Enable the Framework theme through the Drupal admin (yoursite.com/admin/build/themes).
4. Leave Garland enabled as well but make Framework the "default".
5. Set the "administration theme" to a default theme (from this page: /admin/settings/admin) so you don't have to mess with theming the administration part of the site.