One-click installs

On many hosting packages, there is a "one-click install" available for the most commonly-used open source packages such as Wordpress and Drupal.

From our experience, it's hit-or-miss with these. You may have to run some additional rules on your hosting prior to the host getting "prepped" to be ready to install one of the packages. You'll also want to familiarize yourself a bit with databases. The Drupal or Wordpress files that will be installed on your host will "talk" to your mySQL database, so when setting up the database, make note of the hosting connection (usually "localhost" or might be a link such as db2.someotherplace.securelink.net) and the database name, the user name, and the password.

One interesting experience we have is having to convert a database after Fantastico installation of Drupal 7. Our error message included "Illegal mix of collations" -- what happens is some of the database tables are in utf-8 format, and others are not. When the system attempts to save data such as in a view, the system gets "confused" and throws a error. This helped us: http://drupal.org/node/251938

We created a 'convert.php' file to change all the tables to the correct format, and it worked moving forward.

If you're stuck with your one-click install, consider restarting, from the very beginning, going through each step methodically. Usually this entails you setting up your database, user, and pass. Then use your hosting control panel's recommended one-click install, or if you are able, learn File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and use the Filezilla open source FTP software http://filezilla-project.org/ to download the most recent code and install it on your server. Then unpack and follow the recommended installation instructions.

Overall, Google is your friend. Type in the error message and see if other people are having the same issue and/or if they've solved the issue.