Beginning Drupal®

Chapter 3. Your First Drupal Website

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• How to create an Article (news story or blog entry)

• How to create an About Us page

• Adding the RSS (Syndication) block to your sidebar

• Enabling and configuring your Contact Form

• Modifying site permissions to create a members-only website

• How to create new user accounts

• Selecting a new theme

• Downloading and installing a new theme

• Configuring Cron

Quickly get up to speed on your new Drupal website by following along with this chapter. In this overview, you will create content, enable the contact form, add blocks to the left and right sidebars, and explore your site's permissions. At the end of this chapter, you'll have a fully functional website. You will also have explored the most common administrative functions and settings.

The topics covered in this chapter are done at a high level to quickly introduce you to the various administrative areas of Drupal. Once you feel comfortable with the exercises performed in this chapter, you'll be ready to move on to the subsequent chapters that cover these areas, functions, and settings in greater depth.

ADDING CONTENT

You have a message. You want to be heard, or maybe your client does. In either case, one of your first steps will be to add content to your site. Drupal's default installation provides two types of content: Articles and Pages. Both of these items are known as nodes in Drupal's terminology. The concept of a node is important to understand because nodes share a common ...