Beginning Drupal®

Chapter 5. Administration — Blocks, Menus, and Themes

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• Configuring your site's blocks

• Creating new blocks

• Explore a block's visibility settings

• Creating and configuring your site's menus

• Primary and Secondary menus

• Enhancing SEO with custom URL aliases

• Setting a new site theme

• Allow your users to select their own theme

In this chapter you'll review the major building blocks of your site that give it structure; blocks, menus and themes. Blocks are the pieces of content that generally flank the left and right side of a site offering helpful information such as the latest blog posts, recent comments, or the ads that help pay your bills. Menus provide crucial site navigation and are commonly shown horizontally across the top of the site as well as vertically on the side. A theme is one of the most important parts of your site as it controls your site's appearance including all colors, fonts, and layout.

Blocks and menus are added, configured and managed through the Structure section. Themes are appropriately kept under the Appearance section.

BLOCKS

The pieces of content that appear on the left or right side of your website are called blocks in Drupal. Examples include the User login block, the administrative menu, or the help block that you enabled in Chapter 3. Blocks are either supplied by an enabled module or manually created perhaps to display a twitter widget or embed a YouTube video.

As you experienced in Chapter 3, blocks are placed within a region of ...