13 February 2012
I'm evaluating CiviCRM, a contact relationship manager which is installed as a module in either Joomla or Drupal. In my last post, I installed CiviCRM with Joomla (Installing XAMPP and Joomla on Xubuntu 11.10). Today, I'll be installing CiviCRM with Drupal.
I'm starting with a custom install of XAMPP. I installed the the latest version from http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp-linux.html. Download the tarball, and then open a console shell:
sudo tar xvfz ~/Downloads/xampp-linux-1.7.7.tar.gz -C /opt
That's it. I also made the following changes to the /opt/lampp/etc/php.ini file:
display_errors = Offdisplay_startup_errors = Offoutput_buffering = Off
These 'production' settings will prevent warning messages from displaying all over your web pages. Now start XAMPP, and test your installation by pointing your browser to localhost.
sudo /opt/lampp/lampp start
Visit www.drupal.org, and download the latest version of Drupal. I created two sites - a reference site named drupal_demo, and a working site named drupall_crm
sudo mkdir /opt/lampp/htdocs/drupal_demo
sudo unzip ~/Downloads/drupal-7.10.zip -d opt/lampp/htdocs/drupal_demo
sudo chmod -R 755 /opt/lampp/htdocs/drupal_demo
sudo chown -R nobody:nogroup /opt/lampp/htdocs/drupal_demo
Browse to localhost/drupal_demo, and follow the installation instructions, using database name 'drupal_demo'.
sudo mkdir /opt/lampp/htdocs/drupal_crm
sudo unzip ~/Downloads/drupal-7.10.zip -d /opt/lampp/htdocs/drupal_crm
sudo chmod -R 755 /opt/lampp/htdocs/drupal_crm
sudo chown -R nobody:nogroup /opt/lampp/htdocs/drupal_crm
Again, browse to localhost/drupal_crm, and follow the installation instructions. For database name, I used 'drupal_crm'.
To install CiviCRM, I first copy the install package to the web root:
sudo cp ~/Downloads/civicrm-4.0.8-drupal.tar.gz /opt/lampp/htdocs
Then I enter my drupal_crm site as administrator, and select Modules --> Install new module, and I install if from my own local web server, entering: http://localhost/civicrm-4.0.8-drupal.tar.gz
This just seems to unpack the files, and does not automatically start the CiviCRM install process, as Joomla did. To start the install, point the browser to http://localhost/drupal_crm/sites/all/modules/civicrm/install/index.php
Now I have CiviCRM installed in both Joomla and Drupal. As I move forward evaluating CiviCRM, I'll also be comparing Joomla vs. Drupal as my choice of infrastructure.