Burningbird's RealTech

Drupal installation is covered quite nicely in the Drupal documentation, so I won't be covering the steps in detail. My installation consisted of the following steps:

• Download the software to a non-web location.
• Copy the software to each subdirectory where I will be installing Drupal. I decided not to go the "shared" code route, because it doesn't really gain me that much.
• Created a separate database for each Drupal site. Multiple Drupal installations can run on the same database, and can even share common tables, but I prefer to keep my installations separate. Prevents accidental muck-ups, not to mention frequent occurrences of Oopsie! Shit!.
• I then changed the permission of sites/default using chmod o+w sites/default from the command line, though you can set the world write using FTP or whatever file management tool is in use for your site.
• You don't have to hack the configuration file, Drupal does the edits for you (which is why you need to set the previously mentioned write permissions.)
• Once installed, I then reset the write permissions on my default directory, using chmod o-w.
• I'm also supporting clean URLs, so I added the following into each Drupal installation's .htaccess file:

   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule ^(.*)$ index.php?q=$1 [L,QSA]

At this point, Drupal is installed, and I'm ready to do the configuration.