As you work more and more with Drupal, you will likely begin to formulate a list of modules that you feel are most useful to you and want to include them in each site that you create. There may be as many opinions on which ones are the most indispensible as there are Drupal builders but these are my current can't-live-without choices. In basketball terminology, here are my starting 5:

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Now that you have set up your AMP configuration, a fresh database, and your Drupal file structure on your localhost, let’s get to creating a website.

In order for a website to be visible on the internet, it must be hosted. Whether you know it or not, you have a host right under your nose. On your own machine, you can set up what is called a localhost and create a website that resides on your hard drive. In order to make this happen, you will need 3 parts: Apache, which is a web server; MySQL, a database management system; and PHP, the language needed to build dynamic websites. Hence, you have the acronym AMP. Thankfully, there are applications that integrate all of these together so they can be downloaded all at once.

If you think of your Drupal website as a car, you know that the exterior is the part you can see. But you know that it has be powered some way but you don't see that from the outside. You have to actually raise the hood and look underneath to see the machinery that makes it go.

One thing I noticed right away when I became involved with Drupal was that I was seldom part of any discussion about it without somebody talking about one module or another. Modules are at the heart of Drupal. Think of a module as a self-contained unit of source code. Referring back to the puzzle illustration in post #1 of this series, each chunk of the puzzle, containing multiple pieces and already pre-assembled, represents a module.

In preparation for each new NFL season, every team strives to sign players who are some combination of bigger, stronger, and faster than those who are currently on their roster. A similar quest is continuously taking place among those groups who attempt to provide systems for creating websites. A content management system called Drupal, which is now on version 7, is the tool that is leading the way in all of these areas.