Installing drupal

Go to drupal gardens and create a drupal site. This is easy enough to do. Then you want to understand

Create a content
link the content to a menu
Understand themes
adjust themes through structure/blocks

you can download the simple drupal executable that will install drupal for you on your local box. This installation will automatically install

Apache
MySQL
Drupal
PHPAdmin for mysql
control panel to start/stop

You may have to tweek etc hosts in windows to define multiple drupal sites.


127.0.0.1         localhost
127.0.0.1         drupal7.localhost

<VirtualHost *>
  ServerName drupal7.localhost
  DocumentRoot "C:\sites1\drupal-7.0"
  AccessFileName .htaccess
  <Directory "C:\Sites1\drupal-7.0">
      Options Indexes FollowSymLinks
      AllowOverride all
      Order allow,deny
      Allow from all
  </Directory>
</VirtualHost>