Best Practices for Site Admins
I'll keep a list here of best practices that will make your job easier.
Use a good browser
Your site should display well on any modern browser. Unfortunately, some administrator functions may not work perfectly on all browsers. Here's a list of known issues:
- Safari: Support for text editing features, such as TinyMCE, are experimental on Safari 2.x or lower, and may not work well. Safari 3.x may work well, but test before attempting to post a long article. If there's any doubt, consider using Firefox instead.
- Internet Explorer 6 or lower: These older, but still very common, versions of Internet Explorer don't have particular incompatibilities with Drupal; they're just poor products. They don't support tabs, which can make your admin job much easier (see below); they can't handle modern PNG graphics, which you may want to use; and they're horribly insecure. Consider upgrading to Internet Explorer 7, or even better, Firefox.
- Google Chrome: This up and coming browser appears to work very well and we are excited about it but it has not be throughly tested with this guide.
For a good, Drupal-friendly browser, it's hard to get much better than Firefox, but use whatever you like and works well for you. In any case, though, follow this advice:
Experiment in private
If you're experimenting with big changes, overhauling the layout, or otherwise tweaking the site a lot, visitors may see confusing shifts in design (or see in-progress changes you didn't yet want to reveal). Consider taking your site off-line while you work.
See Maintenance and Construction Notices.
Save long text during input
It's easy to forget this when things are working well, but when you administer your site you're communicating with a server that may be thousands of kilometers away, via Internet byways of imperfect stability. Add in the possibility of local trouble on your own computer, and once in a rare while, a page you're working on may go "poof!" without making it into the site database first.
If you're creating a long bit of text, consider copying the work in progress every few minutes, and pasting it into a text editor document locally. Just in case. Please don't use word or other complex word processors as they may insert weird code when you copy and paste into your browser, consider using Wordpad (windows) or TextEdit (Mac).
