Installing a Drupal Module

Drupal is a very powerful CMS platform and has many modules to enhance it's functionality. Installing (contributed) modules is very simple as the process has been kept very rudimentary. Here are the steps needed to install a module:

1. Find & download compatible module
2. Unzip it locally
3. Upload files to your server
4. Read & follow special instructions (if any)
5. Enable the new module
6. Setup permissions (if required)
7. Adjust Settings (if required)

Now lets delve into each of the above steps in a bit of detail:

1. Find & Download compatible Module
Search for the module on the drupal site http://drupal.org/project/modules/. This page has a big list of available modules and you can search for required modules as well. Once you find the module that is compatible with the version of the installed Drupal core, download the compressed "tar.gz" file locally.

2. Unzip it locally
Once the file is available locally, extract the contents to a temporary folder. On Ubuntu, I just double-click on the file to do this. On WinX platforms, this cannot be done directly - you will need to download & install the free & open source tool 7-Zip to do this. Now you should have a folder by the name of the module in your chosen temporary folder.

3. Upload files to your server
Now upload this extracted folder to sites/all/modules folder in your Drupal install. This is the folder that holds all the contributed modules.

4. Read & follow special instructions (if any)
Check the module folder for "README.txt" or "INSTALL.txt" or similarly named files to see if this module requires any special steps for installation. If so, follow those steps to a "T".

5. Enable the new module
Log in to the Drupal admin and go to Administer > Site building > Modules or the Drupal path admin/build/modules. Look for the new module and enable it.

For most cases, you should be good by now. If not, then follow the below steps.

6. Setup permissions (if required)
Some modules need extra permissions to be setup for them to work properly. Grant the permissions as appropriate & required for the module to function properly.

7. Adjust Settings (if required)
Tweak the settings provided by the module (if any) to make it function as per your requirements. Mostly the provided defaults work good, but there could be cases where you need to change the settings to suit your needs.