guide

User permissions allow you to control what users have access to on your site. For example, you can allow anonymous users on your site to see content but only allow authenticated users to post comments. To view your user permissions go to:

Administration menu » User management » Permissions

Depending on the functionality of your drupal site the amount of permissions that can be set could be vast. You will want to carefully go through this page to determine which user roles should have access to which parts of your web site.

Roles allow you to fine tune the access that users have to your site. There are many other uses of roles such as having a certain role automatically subscribed to a newsletter. Roles are a way to categorize your users and define what each group has access to. Examples of roles include: anonymous user, authenticated user, moderator, author, administrator and so on. They can really be anything you want!

By default, Drupal comes with two user roles:

Before you do any user management you will need to set up the user settings as desired for your site. It's possible that this was set up for you by your project manager already and you may not want to make any changes here but it's important to know what options you have just in case you do want to change the settings. Head to:

Administration menu » User management » User settings

People visiting your web site have the ability to create an account, log in, participate in whatever they have permissions to participate in, and log out. There is a lot of power in the drupal user management system.

In order to administer the users on your site head to

Administration menu » User management » Users

Plan to be managing multiple users on your site? Then this section is for you.

User managment has almost become a norm in the web site world. Before a web site was simply a billboard where you could post information for people to read about you or your organization. Now we don't create web sites only as an informational hub but as a social network where people can not only read what you do but participate in what you do.

Lets dive in:

...for the beginning or even completely non-technical administrator of a Drupal site.

This manual is widely incomplete, and is very much a work in progress. It'll keep changing as we find better ways to do things; as viewers report problems, solutions, and discoveries; and as Drupal itself keeps improving. Please let us know if you find errors.

We are referring to url aliases. A url alias is a replacement url for another url. Usually this is done to make things easier and make more sense for you and the people browsing your site, not to mention the search engines. The default urls usually have wierd stuff like "?q=node" but drupal is very nice to convert this sort of thing into something that makes sense.

Below are useful built-in aliases, ready to take you to important pages. Just type the alias into your browser's address bar, after <your site domain>.

Taking care of problems and keeping your site running well.

Maintenance and Construction Notices

Sometimes you'll want to put up an "under construction" sign, or even make your site invisible, while you make big upgrades to the content (or just run experiments). Here are a couple of choices:

Placing an "Under Construction" sign

Blocks are the chunks of text or information that appear on the left and/or right sides of site pages. (Some site layouts can also sport blocks at the top and the bottom of pages.) Drupal provides many ready-to-use blocks with useful information, such as links to popular content; you can create your own blocks as well.

The Blocks administration form

There's a handy form for working with blocks:

What appears on the site's front page, the first page people see when visiting <your site domain>?

Many web sites, especially blogs, list a number of postings, articles, or other nodes on the front page, usually with the most recent node at top. If the nodes have short text, the page may display the title and whole text of the nodes. If the nodes have long text, the page may display the title and a short excerpt ("teaser"); visitors can click on a title, or a "Read more" link, to display the whole node as a page.