Site converted to Drupal

I have been investigating various CMS systems.  The previous site was running on DotNetNuke.  I decided to switch to Drupal (after experimenting with PHPNuke and investigating Joomla briefly), and am so far pretty happy with the Drupal architecture, although I've had some difficulty getting Panels / Panes to work exactly right.

I've documented the experience in case someone could benefit from some of the tips, tricks, or gotchas that I encountered along the way:

Get Drupal
I had experimented with 6.x, and only found one of the desired modules not available yet, and it seemed to be stable, so I’m going with version 6.5.
1.    Went to drupal.org and downloaded the 6.5 version.
2.    Using 7-zip, extract the files.
3.    Using FileZilla, uploaded all of the files and folders that are under the 6.5 folder directly to the root of my web site (which is hosted at GoDaddy).

Create the MySQL database at GoDaddy.com
1.    Logged onto my GoDaddy.com shared hosting account.
2.    Selected Databases.MySQL.
3.    Selected MySQL version 5.
4.    Created a new database with account and user name of dons_drupal2.
5.    Once the database is set up (only takes about 5 minutes), click on “edit / view details” for that  database.
6.    This is where you get the host name if you are using shared hosting (which I am).  Write down the host name (e.g. p50mysql11.secureserver.net).

Copy Drupal files
1.    Copied all of the files under the drupal folder directly to the root of my web site.

Run Install script
1.    Hit the front page of the web site.
2.    Click on Advanced Options and enter the database server name obtained above (because I am using shared hosting).
3.    Enter the database name, user name (both dons_drupal2), and password, and click Save Configuration.

Configure the Site
1.    Create the new administrator account with new password.
2.    Enable the Blog and Path modules.
3.    I already knew I wanted to use the acquia marina theme.  Downloaded it, and placed it under a new “themes” folder in /sites/all.  So ended up with “sites/all/themes/acquia_marina”.
4.    Went to Administer / Site Building and selected the new theme.
5.    Selected configure, to configure the theme.  Uploaded my own logo and turned off the site name.

Add Modules / configure TinyMCE
1.    Copied the following modules to /sites/all/modules:  image, img_assist, panels, tinymce, upload, views.
2.    Get TinyMCE itself.  I needed version 2.1.3 because newer versions are not compatible with the tinymce module.
3.    Copy the tinymce directory under the tinymce module, so you end up with tinymce 2.1.3 itself actually going into the directory:  /sites/all/modules/tinymce/tinymce
4.    Copy the drupalbreak and drupalimage tinymce plugins from the img_assist module folder to tinymce itself.  So copy /sites/all/modules/img_assist/plugins/drupal* to /sites/all/modules/tinymce/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins.
5.    Edit plugin_reg.php to add the plugins to tinymce.  Follow these directions:
* Move or copy the folder 'drupalimage' in the img_assist directory to

[sites/all/]modules/tinymce/tinymce/jscripts/tiny_mce/plugins/

Edit the file plugin_reg.php in the tinymce directory. It's located in:

[sites/all/]modules/tinymce/plugin_reg.php

Add the following lines anywhere above the 'return' statement (without the
<code> tags):
<code>
$plugins['drupalimage'] = array();
$plugins['drupalimage']['theme_advanced_buttons1'] = array('drupalimage');
$plugins['drupalimage']['extended_valid_elements'] = array('img[class|src|border=0|alt|title|width|height|align|name]');
$plugins['drupalbreak'] = array();
$plugins['drupalbreak']['theme_advanced_buttons3'] = array('drupalbreak', 'drupalpagebreak');
</code>

6.    Go to Admin / Site Config / Modules and enable all that new stuff.
7.    Go to User management / Permissions and enable the appropriate roles on the appropriate modules (TODO:  Why isn’t this always necessary?  And shouldn’t there be an admin role instead of just authenticated users? )
8.    Go to Site Config / TinyMCE and select Create a new profile.
9.    Select a name and enable it for some set of roles.
10.    Under Buttons / Plugins, enable your chosen set of buttons and plugins.  Be sure to include the handy drupal break and drupal image buttons so you can separate summary from body and upload images.

Create Site Content
This configuration was good enough for me to be able to create all of my content.  I can upload images, sort things, use the TinyMCE rich editor to create pages and/or panels.  I can use node queues to order blog posts on the home page, and everything else fell in place.

Other tips
To make sure images show up when inserted be sure to set the Input Format to FULL HTML.
To turn off the author name / date info for a page, do it in the theme configuration (at least with this theme).