Drupal - Getting Started

Once I followed the video to install Drupal, I ran into this problem where when I tried to click on any link in the index.php file in the drupal directory it would lead me right back to a view of the directory.

I suspected this has something to do with the fact that I didn't my local installation of apache to serve the index.php file if it was present (similar to how index.html is the file to be served when the user first enters that directory.

So going into my httpd.conf file, I searched for the line "DirectoryIndex", and then modified it to include index.php:

DirectoryIndex index.html index.php

Note how index.html was already being served. And when I went back to my drupal directory and tried a link, it worked!

GD Library Not Found
Upon entering the administrator page, I found that I had some status errors right off the bat. Clicking on the link to see what status errors there were, I found one to say that my "GD Library" was not found. This is an image library that is required for drupal to do some image manipulation for some themes or maybe so content. Anyways, the version of PHP 5.2.5 that I am using actually has this library but it is turned off by default.

So go to the php.ini file, and search for the line "extension=php_gd2.dll" and then there should be a semicolon right before it. Just remove the semicolon and then try it again and that should fix the problem.