Hey dear all, we are a Drupal development company Golems GABB and our main mission is to satisfy our clients in developing websites in our lovely Drupal and this article will describe how to use Drupal. 
Drupal is an amazing tool for creating advanced sites and applications and Drupal gets better and better every day. If you aren’t familiar with Drupal, this short guide will help you to build the first website and to love this amazing CMS. Even if you have never set up the site before this article will take you step-by-step through the entire process giving you the comprehensive overview. 
So here’s where we are going in: 

1. Introduction to content management system in general and then get specific with Drupal. 
2. We will help you to install Drupal and tell you how you can use it. Don’t worry Drupal is FREE! 

So what is Drupal?

Let’s start discovering the fascinating world of creating Drupal site together

Drupal is a content management system, with tens of thousands of add-on features. 10,000's of volunteers create modules, themes and documentation that are all freely available to you. The content management system gives you unbelievable advantages and it also comes with a whole bunch of software.built in so you don’t need to replicate it. 

What is Drupal used for 

Drupal is an open source so therefore Drupal is free and that’s the nature of the open-source software you can download, use it, change it and it’s all free and because it’s an open-source it’s licensed to you to use and to change and even redistribute it you want. 
Thus, this fantastic CMS can be used for any commercial fields, as declares drupal.org: sports and entertainment, travel and tourism, eCommerce, healthcare, media and publishing, government, and so on. 

Why use Drupal?

We do not want to waste your time telling in a literature manner how Drupal is fantastic. Here are the strong and acknowledge proofs):

1. Website security and safety
2. СEO optimization and speed
3. Easy to extend and use
4. Reasonable cost and easily supported
5. Functionality
6. Community

Each of these items is successfully proven and convinced by the top world companies, that use Drupal.

Step 1: How to find the best hosting for your best Drupal site

Not only cool Drupal developers are the key aspect of developing your incredible project. Web hosting - the second core aspect that has to be taken into account in order to get your project off the ground. Plenty of web server providers allow us to choose a server by the next criteria:

• uptime - this percentage shows how much time your site will be up and running. We recommend that you choose something that meets the industry standard of 99.9%.
• cool support team - these guys have to be your reliable friends, the less time you need to discuss them a problem, the less time there needs to fix and recover the site. It’s an axiom.
• 24/7 team support availability - Consequently, try to choose a qualification support team, that will be able to assist you at any time.
• reasonable price per service - selecting the best vendor, do not miss the point described above and compare it with the price aspect. 

Thus, you have a wide choice and it is not limited by a certain provider.

How to use Drupal to build a website?

Step 2: Drupal installation on the server environment

There are two popular ways on how to install Drupal on your server or on the local environment: manually or using Auto-installer. Please make sure, the installation steps are described based on Drupal 8 and can be applicable to Drupal 7, but there may be some issues. 
    One more but not least thing you have to take into account - is Drupal 8 requirements to make sure your installation will go smoothly and carefully. 
    Okay, here is a list of the setting your server must full fill in order to run Drupal: 

1. Database server:

   Required MySQL 5.5.3/MariaDB 5.5.20/Percona Server 5.5.8 or higher with InnoDB as the primary storage engine, and requires the PDO database extension.

   PostgreSQL. Required PostgreSQL 9.1.2 or higher. Also, check the status of PostgreSQL support in Drupal 8

   SQLite. Supports SQLite 3.6.8 or higher

2. PHP requirements:
   PHP version 7.2 or higher. Please notice PHP 5.5, 5.6 and 7.0 reached their official end-of-life at the end of 2018, and PHP 7.1 reached its end-of-life on December 1, 2019.

If you’ve got any questions about any of those settings please go to the Drupal “Bible” drupal.org and find more information here: https://www.drupal.org/docs/8  

Drupal Installation Manually 

Before you start installing Drupal, you have to make sure that your server and database are currently started. To achieve this, please open the server admin panel and check whether the mentioned buttons (properties) are turned on.

Step 1: Download Drupal
Everything is easy here, go to the drupal.com website to download Drupal archive.

Step 2: Upload Drupal & unpackage
Once you've got it, head back over to the control panel for your web host. Then we need a couple of things to do. So we’ve downloaded Drupal let’s go ahead and upload it by clicking on the file manager. Pay your attention, there need to extract the Drupal archive (.tag or .zip) into the  /public.html file. Do not forget to delete zip archive downloaded previously. 

Step 3: Set up a database
Most of cPanels have a MySQL database wizard to correctly set up the site’s database. In the appropriate window you’ll see the form to fill it out with the necessary information: 
database name;
database username and set the password to it (however you get your password just make sure they’re very secure)
set up the database user permission. And finally, Save and return Home.

Step 4: Go to your Drupal website
Congratulations, if you can see the Drupal installation page - everything is perfect. The following is a simple Drupal configuration:

1. Сhoose the language
2. Choose the appropriate profile for sure. There are two options to select: Standard (pre-configured version) and Minimal (no pre-configured functionality, suitable for advanced users). Verify requirements - this option will verify if all options are turned one. If so, you’ll be redirected to the next option. In other cases, Drupal installation interface will show you the appropriate tools on Drupal.org to fix issues related to their correct installation. 
3. The next option is the Set up database, where you need to put data generated in the Step 3, At this point Drupal will be checking if the connected database is right. 
4. Further, Drupal installation will start. Depending on your server and internet speed this takes a few minutes? but it shouldn’t take too long. Please notice, that each module has to be installed from Drupal.org and be downloaded on your server.
5. And yeah, the last option to be performed - Configure site, there need to fill the following fields out: 
   Site name - set your site name. No need to add it right now, will come up with a solution and change it. , 
   Site email address - it can't be your real email address, it can be a face one, 
   Site maintenance account -  user name, password, confirm password, Email address (please make sure that you set a strong password). 
   Regional settings (default country, Default time zone), and a few checkboxes have to be selected. 

   Voilà, Drupal will be doing the final checks and setting up the configuration files to finish its installation. 
   Welcome to try your Drupal website and Drupal dashboard.  

Auto Drupal Installation

In this chapter, we would like to describe to you how automatically install Drupal with the help of servers tools. But, there is one problem - there isn’t one and a common scheme, because every separate server has its order and approach to this. But a few things are common: there needs to find the appropriate service provider, sign up and find the section with available tools. For instance Digital.ocean toolbar: 

 

Most likely, you’re considering the platform to choose for building your first website, make sure Drupal for a beginner is a very comfortable and secure system because Drupal website builder is extremely easy to use thanks to dozens of videos available in youtube. If you’re reading this article you definitely will make the right decision. Email us, in case you have cool ideas, who knows, maybe in feature, it’ll be something like bitcoin). 
Your developers and Drupal fans.