Add a Content Type

To add a content type, click on the link that says “+ Add Content Type”. This will take you into the “New Content Type” area. This area looks like this:

Let’s go through each item, line by line.

• Name – The name of the content type that will appear in the administration menu when adding content. Your users never see this. Some of the default names for content types are “Article” and “Basic Page”. You can be as creative or plain as you want here.
• Description – Specify to your authors what kind of content is expected here. Describe it thoroughly enough so that there is no confusion. This field is also only seen by administrators.
• Submission form settings – These options modify the “Add Content” page when users input content.
  • Title field label – This is what appears for the author prompting him for a title for the content piece.
  • Preview before submitting – Whether the user may, can’t or must see a preview of the post before submitting.
  • Explanation or submission guidelines – Special instructions given to the author at the very top of the “Add Content” page.
• Publishing Options – lkjlkj

Edit a Content Type

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Manage Fields

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Manage Display

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Delete a Content Type

User management takes place in the “People” tab in the administrator toolbar. Initially loading this screen looks like the image below.

The screen shows you how you can filter your users by specific roles, permissions or status (we’ll get into what these mean later). You will also find options to add users and a tab for setting user permissions.

The user list shows some useful information and options at a glance. You can see a user’s name, status (whether they are active or blocked), how long they’ve been a member of the site, the last time they accessed the site and options to edit the user.

Roles and Permissions

Before we get into how to add and edit users, it’s best if we understand roles and permissions.

Roles

Think of roles as a “permissions group”. By default, Drupal has three roles:

• Anonymous User – This is typically a user without an account
• Authenticated User – A user that has created an account
• Administrator – A site administrator

Adding Roles

To add a role, type in a name for your role, for example, “moderator”. Make the role’s name something descriptive that defines what this type of user’s job should be. Once you have defined your new role, you can set specific permissions that make sense for that user type.

Permissions

Permissions define the different tasks that certain roles can perform. This can be highly customized and may take some time to go through all of the options. To get to the permissions screen, make sure you are in the People section of the administration area. Then click on the tab that says Permissions. Here, it will show you all of your roles in the top of the permissions list. Each permission has a title, description and checkbox for each role.

Set each permission according to the abilities you would like to give that specific role. If you are having problems with certain functionalities on your site not appearing, most likely you have an issue in this section of the site. It doesn’t make sense to go through all of the permissions you can set in this tutorial. These are pretty well explained in their title and description. Also, every module you add to Drupal normally modifies this area.

Adding Users

If you need to manually add a user, one way to do it is through the administration interface. Again, in the People section, you will need to be under the List tab. This is the default view when you click on People. There is a link in this screen that says + Add user. Click this link, and you will be given the opportunity to create a new user. This screen allows you to set information about this user and is more or less like your typical registration screen on any website with a couple of notable exceptions. You can set a status for the new user. A status is either blocked or active. You can also set what role(s) a user has in this screen.

Editing Users

You can edit a user by looking at the list view of the users under the People section of the administration menu. Find the user you would like to edit and click the edit link under the operations column. This brings up a screen very similar to the one used to add new users, with a couple of exceptions. Here, there are normally a couple more options, like adding a picture.

All of the user options can be managed in the Configuration section of Drupal under Configuration >> People >> Account Settings. Here, you can set what fields a user can enter and specify other user management behaviors. This area defines some of the settings like the size of a users picture, what happens to a user’s data if they are deleted, and the content of auto-generated emails.

First you should download my Views code that I’ve exported for you.

From here you need to go to the administration area and click Structure > Views. At the top of the screen, you will see a button that says “Import View from Code”. This is where you need to paste the contents of the text file you just downloaded. Give it a meaningful name. I named mine front_page, but you can name yours whatever you want. It won’t work yet.

After you have loaded your new view, find it in the list of views you have installed and click the “edit” button. This is the screen you should get, minus my drawings….

When you first get to this area, click Pages (red circle on the top right) and then insert the page you have designated as your front page in the area at the bottom left (the other red circle).

That’s it, it should be up and working!

By clicking on “Structure” at the top of the Drupal 7 administration menu (by logging in as an administrator, the menu on the top of the screen), you will find your way into the structure configuration of Drupal. This article will go through each item one by one and explain the details of the configurations you can make to them.

There are several items here that you can configure. Since they all require a bit of knowledge, its all just too big for one post. I have broken this section up into several posts to make it easier to read.

Blocks – Manage your Drupal blocks. Put them into the regions where you want them and even create custom blocks. Understand what blocks are in Drupal and be able to fully understand them.

Content Types – Modify your content settings. Learn how to change the default settings on your content types, create custom content types, and add fields to existing content types.

Menus – Change your menus or add new custom menus. Learn about how menus work in Drupal. Reorganize, rename and generally edit and configure your menus.

Taxonomy – Your site’s hierarchy. Create tags, breadcrumbs, and classifications in your Drupal site. Understand the relationship between parent and child tags and what a vocabulary is.

The structure area is also a place where modules will put their configuration. For example, if you have installed the views module, it’s configuration will be here in the structure area. Anything that affects the layout of the site is found in this area. Don’t be fooled by the existence of an “Appearance” menu. “Structure” is your place to make layout changes to your site. “Appearance” is more or less for picking a theme and setting theme specific options.

Look at the articles above. Each gives a detailed description of its area of the structure menu. After studying those articles, you should become an expert on Drupal Structure.

A block is a functional piece of content within Drupal. Everything that visitors see is in a block and each block can be given its own area (called regions) on the website.

Block region locations are set within the theme. We will get to changing block locations later, when we cover Drupal 7 theming. For now will focus on enabling and disabling blocks and moving them between regions. Ok, so, by now you have probably clicked on the “Structure” button at the top of the screen and, if you’re like me and get ahead of yourself, you’ve also clicked on the link that says “Blocks”. If you haven’t, do so now. Here is what you should see (without my red comments):

Changing Block Layout Based on the Theme

Let’s start from the top of this picture and move our way down. Remember we said that regions are locations within a theme, well, it just so happens that each theme can have different definitions of where a region should be, and you can have different definitions of which region your block should be in based on your theme. If you look in the top right corner of you screen, you will see tabs for each of your enabled themes. In this case, “Bartik” and “Seven” are enabled. The active theme (in this case, the one in white) is the one for which the block layout is being changed. Your changes here do not affect the other theme (Seven in this example).

Getting a Graphic of the Block Regions for your Theme

Most Drupal 7 themes come with a demonstration of the block regions that shows you the names of the different regions according to that theme. This is, of course, if the developer wasn’t lazy and left it out. You can normally get a feel for where the regions are located based on their names. For example, “Header” is going to be at the top of the page in 99% of themes. Clicking on the “Demonstrate block regions (Theme)” will bring up a graphic similar to the one below. Use this as your guide when placing your blocks.

Moving those Blocks around

There are two ways to move around the blocks on this screen. The easiest way is with the drag and drop method. There is a four-way arrow next to the name of each block, grab it with your mouse and move the block under the desired heading. That’s all there is to it, you’ve moved a block.

If, for some reason, you don’t have javascript enabled or just don’t like drag and drop, you can use the drop down menus next to the block names to change their region.

Caution: Sometimes moving a block to another region can make it look really bad, some additional theming may be necessary.

When you are finished moving around your blocks, make sure you click the “Save Blocks” button at the bottom of the screen.

Warning: If you forget to click the “Save Blocks” button at the bottom of the screen, you WILL lose all of your changes.

Adding a Custom Block

First, click the “Add Block” link near the top of the page. This will bring up a new page that is very similar to Drupal’s page for adding new content.

Let’s go through each field, one by one:

• Block Description – What you will see in the block layout page to describe the block. If you are a developer, make this something very clear for your users. If you’re not a developer, still make it very clear so that you will know what your block is for 3 months from now when you forgot writing it.
• Block Title - The default title for the block (this can be overridden later on in the appearance settings). Make this something you would like to be displayed to the public as a title above the block.
• Block Body - The meat of your block. This can be any text format, but will most likely be Full HTML or PHP Code (you need to have the PHP Filter module enabled in order to use PHP Code as a text format). If you use PHP Code to make a block, you need to start and end your function with the <?php and ?> tags respectively. When using PHP Code, think of the Block Body as a function, and whatever you return will be displayed. If you have more questions about this, leave a comment and I’ll help you out.
• Region Settings – The region of the page where the block will appear. You can always change this later on using the procedure in the last section.
• Visibility Settings – This is where you can specify whenyour blocks can appear. These are the default options:
  • Pages – Two option here for default behavior. (1) The block appears on every page except the ones you list or (2) the block appears only on the pages you specify. You specify pages by typing the path to the page without your domain name. For example, if you have a page at http://www.example.com/node/1234, you would type in node/1234 in the textbox to specify that page.
  • Content types - Restrict your block to certain content types. For example, if you have a “Recent News” block that you made that only should appear on pages with articles and not on basic pages, check the box that says “Article” and it will only appear on article nodes. Note: if you don’t check anything here, your block will appear in all content types.
  • Roles - Restrict the block to people with certain permissions. This is great if, for example, you have a site with “members only” areas. Only authenticated users will be able to view a block if you have only the “authenticated user” button selected. Another good example of restricting a block is if you are an administrator and want to see who’s online and their IP addresses. You could use a who’s online block and limit its use to only administrators. Again, if you leave all of these unchecked, anyone user role can see your block.
  • Users - Let users decide whether they want the block to appear or not…or don’t. These are your choices here.

Remember, in order to change any of these items below, you must click “Save Block”. This article is part of a large Drupal 7 Tutorial and a subarticle about Drupal’s Structure Menu. Check out those posts for more valuable information!

There are two parts to Drupal’s data that you need to back up. We will look at both the file system and the database. This is where your valuable data is hiding.

Backing up the Database

Most webhosting comes with a program called phpMyAdmin. This is by far the easiest way to do a backup. The login to phpMyAdmin varies widely by webhost, so I really can’t give instructions on how to get there, but if you can get to phpMyAdmin, then follow these instructions.

When you log in to phpMyAdmin, you will see two frames. The frame on the left shows your databases, and the right shows some actions you can take on your server. Find your database on the left hand side. Click on it. The illustration below shows where you can select the database on the left.

When you’ve selected your database, you need to click the “Export” button in the right hand frame, as shown above. This will take you to the PhpMyAdmin export screen. Which looks like this:

You don’t need to change any of these options except for “Compression”. You want to use some sort of compression, I like gzip, but you can use zip if you like. The compression keeps you from downloading a gigantic text file. After you click “Go” in the bottom right hand corner, your browser will download a file that contains your database backup. Keep this in a safe place, its your backup.

Database Backup without PhpMyAdmin

If you need to backup your database without using PhpMyAdmin, you can do so by using your webhost’s SSH server. You will need a tool like PuTTY (Windows), or the terminal console (Linux/Mac). These directions are almost the same for both methods, except the first step.

Step 1 (on terminal consoles only), type in the following, replacing with your information:

ssh username@yourdomain.com

It will prompt you for your password, tell it your webhosting password.

Step 1 (PuTTY), log in to your webserver using SSH and your username and password.

Step 2, dump (backup to a file) your database. Type in the following command, again, replacing my sample data with your real data:

mysqldump --user=XXXXXXXX --password=XXXXXXX --databases DB_NAME > /PATH/TO/DUMPFILE.SQL

You need to use your MySQL username and password for this command. This will save your file to wherever you told it to save by replacing /PATH/TO/DUMPFILE.SQL with a real path. You now want to compress this new file and remove the original. Run the following series of commands:

tar cvzf /PATH/TO/mybackup.tar.gz /PATH/TO/DUMPFILE.SQL
rm /PATH/TO/DUMPFILE.SQL

This compresses the data into a new file called mybackup.tar.gz and deletes the old (large) .SQL file. Now, use FTP or a file navigator provided by your webhost to navigate to the path you set in “/PATH/TO” and then download mybackup.tar.gz. This is your backed up database.

You should probably run a database backup every day, or at least once a week. This is where the bulk of your content and information is.

Backing Up Drupal’s Files

Using your favorite FTP client, sign in to where you keep your website’s files. Drupal’s core files are really only going to change when you do an update, so you don’t really need to download the whole site except when you make updates. The site is going to be located in your public_html or www folder on a Linux server. You should download this entire folder when you make updates.

All of your customized information (themes, modules, uploaded media, etc) is located in the sites folder. In your web root folder, you will want to download the entire sites folder. This folder can be MASSIVE if you have a lot of media on your site, such as an e-commerce website or video hosting service. You can get away with downloading this folder a little less often than your database. I would recommend weekly and at least monthly.

Restoring your Database

To restore your database, the procedure is very similar to backing it up. You need to log in to PhpMyAdmin like before and then find your database. This is where things change a little bit. Instead of clicking “Export” at the top, you should click “Import”. Don’t change any of the settings. Click where it says “Choose File” and then pick your backup when the dialog pops up.

If the script times out, don’t worry, just run it again and it will pick from where it left off. If not, it should at least tell you where it failed and what query it was on, you have the option to skip a number of queries at the beginning when you upload the file.

Database Restore without PhpMyAdmin

If you don’t have PhpMyAdmin with your webhost, don’t despair. Here are the instructions to do it using SSH.

First, put your backup file on your webserver using FTP in a spot where you can find it. We will call this /PATH/TO/mybackup.tar.gz

Then, log in to your SSH server using the method above for a Database Backup. When you are logged in, you need to use the following command to restore the database from your backup.

WARNING: This will erase any data you have in your database and replace it with your backup data.

cd /PATH/TO
tar -xvf mybackup.tar.gz
mysql -u root -p[database_password] [database_name] < DUMPFILE.sql

Again, you need to replace this with your specific information. This procedure will restore you database to its condition at the time of your backup.

Restoring your Files

Using an FTP client, upload the files in your backup to their appropriate location (where you backed them up from).

Moving a Drupal Site

If you are using this procedure to move a site from one server to another, you need to run the backup and restore instructions above, but restore to the new server. After doing this, you will find that your site probably doesn’t work. You need to edit the /sites/default/settings.php file to put in your new database login information. After doing this, you should have been able to move your website to a different server with no problems.

Content Overview

This may look familiar if you read my post on the Drupal navigation menu. Click on the content menu at the top of the screen. First let’s look at the layout of the screen and what everything means. I have numbered everything for simplicity. We will go over each area in order.

1. Top Menu - Your top menu probably looks different than the one above. This is because installing modules will add to this window. My example site is a fully operational, production site. The top menu gives you an opportunity to manage your modules and also completely different content types (content or media like pictures and videos). By default, you are in the “Content” section of the top menu. If you would like to manage comments that your users have made, you can click on the “Comments” menu, and many of the ideas are the same as what is presented here.
2. Add Content – Click this link to add content, just like it says. This will bring up a completely different screen for adding and editing content. We will get to this in detail a little bit later.
3. Filter Content – This is where you can filter the content types that appear in your content list (5). You can filter by status, type, and language. We’ll talk about what all of this means in a little bit.
4. Bulk Updates -You can change properties of your content quickly by doing a bulk update. Just click the checkboxes in your content list (5) and then apply a change from the bulk update drop down list. The bulk update allows you to do a number of things:
   • Publish Selected Content – If you have written content and saved it as a draft, you can publish it to your website by “Publishing” the content. Visitors to your webpage will then be able to see the content.
   • Unpublish Selected Content – This will take a piece of content and return it to draft mode. It does not delete the item, but it does take it down from your website.
   • Promote Selected Content to Front Page –
     If you have a front page that shows the latest content, this will put that item on your front page.
   • Demote Selected Content from Front Page – This takes it off the front page.
   • Make Selected Content Sticky – Sticky items are those that like to “stick” to the top whenever they are in a list. Sticky is more or less another way of saying “give this content priority over other content”.
   • Make Selected Content Not Sticky – This removes that sticky status.
   • Delete Selected Content – If you are using Ubercart, this is a product in your webstore.
5. Node List - I have been calling this a content list up until now. Let’s first define what a node is.
   

   A node is any piece of content in Drupal 7. It’s an all encompassing term for article, basic page, poll, product, etc.

   The node list might be a little overwhelming at first, but let’s break it down into its parts.

   • Title – This is the title of the post. It is what will be displayed on the top of the screen and also in your browser bar. Make sure you make powerful titles for your posts so that people can find them.
   • Type – These are the content types we discussed at the very beginning of the post.
   • Author – This is the user that wrote the node.
   • Status – The status of the node: published, sticky, promoted to front page, etc.
   • Updated – The last time anyone has made changes to the node.
   • Language - The language of the article (defined by the author). This could also be “undefined”. You really only need to pay attention to this on a multilingual site.
   • Operations – Edit brings up the “edit post” screen (very similar to adding a post), delete removes the post and deletes it forever (Note: if you just unpublish posts, you never have to delete them. Unless you have a good reason, you should probably never delete your posts).

Adding and Editing Content

Let’s start with an overview of the “Add Content” area of your Drupal 7. You will get here by first clicking on the top navigation menu “Content” then clicking on “+ Add Content”. Drupal will then ask you what type of content you would like to add. You can choose anything you’d like, but I’ll walk you through adding a basic page. So, click on the “Basic Page” link. Also, if you click on the edit button in the node list, it will bring up this page, it will just have your current content in it.

1. Title – The title of your post. This will be displayed as the heading of your post and in the browser bar. Pick this carefully. Good titles determine whether someone will be able to find your page or not.
2. Body - The meat of your page. This is where your actual content goes. If I was writing this article in Drupal, this text you are reading would have been in the body section. You write this text in HTML. If you or your users don’t know HTML, see my post on installing a WYSIWYG editor for Drupal.
3. Text Format - There are typically three types of inputs here (but you can add more when configuring your site). The types are “Full HTML”, “Filtered HTML” and “Plain Text”. These determine what HTML tags you can use in your node. Typically for a regular node, you’ll want to use “Full HTML”. The others are for filtering user input so nefarious users can’t turn your site into spam. For example, comments might use “Plain Text” or “Filtered HTML”. The amount of restriction between input types depends on your setting in your site configuration.
4. Special Settings - See Below.
5. Save and Preview Buttons - Press save to save your changes and commit to your changes. Press preview to see what they look like without committing.

Special Settings

Section 4 above, special setting are all the nitty-gritty details about your post. You can alter the behavior of your node by modifying these special special settings.

Menu Settings

Is this content super important? You may want to put it in a menu then. This allows you to be able to automatically place your content in a menu heading and create the menu right here on the spot. Here’s how you do it:

First, you have to click “Provide a menu link”, when you do this, thanks to the magic of javascript, you will have a plethora of options appear. They are pretty self explanatory, but I’ll explain them anyway.

The menu link title is what will appear in the menu. You probably want to keep this short and sweet, but that’s up to you. The description is what will appear when someone puts their mouse over top of your new menu. They don’t have to click anything, it just gives them an idea of what their about to click on. Parent item specifies the parent of your menu. Leave this blank if your new menu is NOT a submenu of something else. This is mainly for making submenus. Weight specifies the order that the menu items come in. Its really hard to set this from here because you normally don’t know the weights of the other menu items. You are better off managing menu weights in the structure area of Drupal 7.

When you save your new node, the menus will be automatically created. If your node isn’t published and you don’t see your menu, don’t be alarmed. Drupal is only going to display menus that have content.

Revision Information

This section allows you to take notes about changes to the content. This is good for larger websites where many people are working on the content. Update this with the changes you are making and why, then other users can see what you were up to and what you were thinking when changing the node.

URL Path Alias

Huh? The uniform resource locator (URL) path alias is fancy name for “better web address”. Drupal will typically make your web address something like http://www.example.com/node/12342342. This isn’t very descriptive or easy to remember. In order to change that into something more descriptive, write a machine-readable name in the text box. For example, if your node is about Monarch Butterflies, you could make your URL Path Alias monarch-butterflies and the new path would be http://www.example.com/monarch-butterflies. Much easier to remember!

Comment Settings

Do you want to allow users to leave comments? “Open” for yes, “Closed” for no. That simple.

Authoring Information

The name of the author and the date the article was written. If you want to assign someone else as the author or fudge the date of a post, this is the place to do it.

Publishing Information

These are the settings we talked about earlier when we discussed bulk updates. This is where we specify the publishing options for a single node.

If the Published box is checked, the node will be visible to the public.

The Promoted to the front page option will put the new node on the front page if you haven’t specified a specific node to be your front page. We will discuss a static front page later when we talk about configuring Drupal. If you have a static front page, this button doesn’t do anything.

The Sticky at the top of lists checkbox will give this node priority in searches and lists. It will appear at the top of any list of nodes in the site. Please note though, if you have a lot of “Sticky” nodes, then this may not be as close to the top as you’d like. Make some of the other nodes “Not Sticky” and then you will get that priority back.

This is all there is to it. When you’re happy with your content, click Save, and if you’ve chosen to publish it, it will be up on your site. Congratulations!

Note that this (default) dashboard has the “Recent content”, “Search form”, and “Who’s new” blocks enabled.

Blocks are Drupal 7′s functional units. They all do a specific task, largely independent from the other blocks.

Let’s say that you would like to have other blocks in your dashboard besides the defaults. There is a way to do this. Click on the link that says “+ Customize dashboard”. You will see an area on the top of your dashboard that looks like this:

Each of those dark areas are additional blocks that you can add to your dashboard. Just grab on with your mouse and drag it to the area of the dashboard where you would like to see it, and ouila, you’ve just expanded your Drupal administrators dashboard. You can also move existing blocks around this way.

Can’t find the block you’d like in the list they gave you? Want something different than the 4 choices of additional dashboard blocks? Don’t worry, you can add them. After opening up the customization drop down, click the link that says “Add other blocks”. This will take you to an entirely other area with lots of options. Your new area looks like this:

Here you can add non-default items to your dashboard. There are three regions in the dashboard.

A region in Drupal is a layout area where you put blocks. For example, a sidebar or a header are regions of your webpage.

The three regions in the dashboard are:

• Dashboard (main) This is the large region of your dashboard. In the default theme it is on the left and takes up about 2/3 the width of the dashboard.
• Dashboard (sidebar) The other 1/3 of the width of the dashboard. This is the sidebar. It is on the right in the default theme.
• Dashboard (inactive) Remember the dark blocks we were able to drag and drop? These were in the Dashboard (inactive) region.
• - None – Not really a region, but it is what appears when a block is not assigned to a region.

If you would like to place a nonstandard block in one of the three regions, just change the drop-down box in the column “Region” to the location where you would like to see your block. You can also drag and drop the blocks around to the different regions.

Caution: Make sure you hit the “Save Blocks” button at the bottom of the screen before proceeding, or you will lose all of your changes.

Each block also has a configure button to change settings within the block itself. Every block has unique configurable settings that you can change and tweak. This is covered more extensively in my post on Drupal 7′s structure. The only thing you need to know that isn’t covered in that post is that your default theme for the dashboard is “Seven (administration theme)”.

This pretty much covers the dashboard. Like I promised, there’s not a whole lot to it and it is pretty simple. If you still have questions, chances are, someone else has the same question. Post a comment with any questions and I will be happy to help you out.

At first glance, Drupal 7 can seem daunting, but it’s not as bad as you think. The design of Drupal makes it so that you have to do no changes to the source code to accomplish your goals in the system. This has the downside that it can have seemingly over complex menus and options. It’s really a trade off, easy interface vs flexible software. This guide seeks to make using Drupal easier for the beginning user.

First, before starting, you need to access the administrative area of the website. Unlike other content management systems (CMS), Drupal’s administration panel is highly integrated with the site. In the default installation, there is a login block installed. Sign in with the username and password you created when installing Drupal 7.

The sections in a default Drupal configuration are:

• Dashboard
• Content
• Structure
• Appearance
• People
• Modules
• Configuration
• Reports

There is also a shortcuts menu below this one. With the default installation this shows:

• Add Content
• Find Content

Rather than describing in detail, each of these menus, the menu area will be briefly described with a link to a detailed page about the administration area.

Drupal’s Dashboard

The Drupal 7 dashboard is an area where you can put links and widgets to your favorite, most used areas of the site. I hardly ever use the dashboard, but think of it as your desktop. By default, this area displays recently added content, recent users, and a search bar for the site.

Content Menu

The content menu is the heart of the Drupal interface. After you have your site up and running, this is the area that you will use on a daily basis and most of the other areas will be largely ignored.

Content is considered the articles, pages, blog posts, polls, products (if you are using Ubercart or Commerce modules), etc. that are the key to your site. Content types are not limited to those I just mentioned, many modules add their own content types, these types should cover it for most people though.

Basic Content Types

This content area shows a nice interface of current content and some simple filters. It provides mechanisms to make bulk updates to your content. This is also where you go to add, edit and delete site content.

Structure Menu

The structure menu houses the key areas for managing the navigation and secondary appearance of your website. What is secondary appearance? This is all the non-critical, but important, information you see on the typical website. Some examples are the user login, search box, recent content menus. You will access this area from time to time in a fully configured and setup website in order to add menu items and taxonomy data.

Basic Structure Types

You can manage all of these “structure types” within the structure menu. Some of the items you can do here include moving around the location and disabling blocks, defining special properties for  certain types of content, creating your main menus, and defining your categorization. This is all discussed further in my post on Drupal structure.

Appearance Menu

The appearance menu’s name is somewhat deceiving. Most changes to appearance occur in the structure menu. The appearance menu houses Drupal 7′s theming engine. Basically the only thing you can do here is change what them you are using and load in new themes. If the theme you are using has specific options, such as different colors, you can find them here. Don’t be deceived by the title of this menu. If you want to do some serious customization of the site appearance, you will have to dig into the cascading style sheets (CSS) and make changes there.

People Menu

People is just another word for users. This is where you manage your website users, administrators, authors, etc. You can see who has signed up for your site and any personal information they have trusted you with. You can block users from the site or crown them as an administrator. This is also where you come to manage user types and permissions. In Drupal you are not limited to an anonymous user, authenticated user and an admin user. You can add all kinds of users. For example, say you have content authors and editors. You can add an author role and an editor role and only allow authors to write articles while an editor can write and publish articles. The possibilities are endless. For more details on how to do this, see my post on managing permissions and users.

Modules Menu

This is where you add, install, enable and configure additional functionality to Drupal. Modules are extensions to the Drupal core that can do a lot of really neat things, such as interface with Google Analytics or even go so far as to add a shopping cart to Drupal 7. Please see my post on installing and managing modules for more details.

Configuration Menu

In the configuration menu, you can manage your entire sites configuration and many module configurations. There is way too much detail to get into in this post, but my post on managing your Drupal 7 configuration goes into detail on each of the settings in the configuration menu in a default installation.

Reports Menu

The reports section gives you details about how your site is running. Here you can view your logs, see if your site is up to date, see who’s been accessing your site and look at traffic, and also see what errors have been occurring on the site. These can be a great resource to check up on your site to see how it is doing. The reports are not, however, a substitute for a good analytics package.

This pretty much sums up the purpose of administration menu section in Drupal and gives you a preview of what you can do. Read the other articles in the series to really get a feel for Drupal 7 and its power. This tutorial is a work in progress, if some of the links are broken, its probably because I haven’t written the article yet. Drop some comments if you have any questions for me.