Clean URL with Drupal 6 on WAMP

I started good web development (from a clicky-point format) when I first discovered Squarespace. (I still host one of my business websites, Hard Knock Laughs, from the platform.) Wordpress (again, from the clicky-point format) never really did it for me, and Squarespace provided everything I would have done by hand, quick, much better, and based from a viewpoint of publishing. Now people weren't just "making websites," they were "publishing" media.

Drupal brings me back to square one...minor pun unintended. It's a FANTASTIC exercise in PHP, Server configuration, SQL work, and RTFingM, so I'm enjoying the head first immersion into the tools, but after all of the nitty-gritty work is set up, you're kind of left with the Wordpress problem asking yourself, "What's next?" The initial page looks like trash and I have no idea where to go to improve it.

I'm working with Front End Drupal (Hogbin and Kafer, 2009) with the objective of learning how to design, but without ever really making a first page in Drupal, working on the Front End theming tools is a little ahead of myself...which is where I kind of like to be anyway.

I set up a separate partition on my Acer Aspire to run WAMP with Apache 2.2.11, PHP 5.2.11 (had to change the default WAMP version to fix the Drupal degeneration problem), and mySQL 5.1.36. This laptop is running Windows 7 and I had never dived into its Disk Administrator before. I remember telling a buddy that I was about to break my machine, and being particularly delighted by that! I started as an IT 10 years ago with the U.S. Coast Guard, and have since "broken" so many machines that I consider myself an expert IT ;)

Anyway, Drupal 6 had an interesting hurdle with Clean URLs when you install it on a WAMP configuration. You have to get into the Apache HTTPD.conf file and I found good instructions through these references.

• http://www.apaddedcell.com/enabling-clean-urls-and-the-path-module-in-drupal
• http://drupal.org/node/54832
• http://www.apaddedcell.com/creating-a-custom-home-page-in-drupal-using-views

What I've noticed starting this whole journey is that if you Google (sorry for using the word as a verb, but I've since given up my fight with people letting Google take over what we know as the Internet experience!) a specific error, you will find very GOOD articles from the Drupal.org community! Secondly, I cannot stress how valuable it is to read the README.txt files in these installation files. They are called "read me" for a reason, and their implementation and adherence to separates the annoying novices from the eager-to-learn professionals!

But I digress, the purpose of this entry was to log the references I found for the Clean URL problem associated with installing Drupal 6 on a WAMP setup on a Windows machine.

Kind Regards -- Chad.

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