New Drupal 6 Administrator's Overview
The homepage as it stands (you get back to it by clicking Home in the breadcrumb or the Drupal icon) is more or less a task oriented overview of some of the more important features of Drupal's administer menu shown on the left of the screen.
Since the administration section is where the business of building and running a Drupal site occurs, let's take a look at what that page provides and how it is organized. Clicking on this link (or Administer in the main menu) brings up the admin page as shown by the following screenshot:
The admin page can be viewed either By task as shown here or By module. Either way, whatever you view here can be found in the Administer menu on the left-hand side. At the moment, viewing the admin section By task is probably more intuitive but at a later stage you might find that having direct access to specific modules is more efficient, and in this case, the By module view will probably be more suitable. Administration is broken up into five main categories that cover all the aspects of running the site.
Content Management: Fundamentally, content management is the most important aspect of any large site because it directly determines how easy or hard it is for users to access the information they are looking for. This section gives a broad and fine grained control over what content the site can present, how it is organized, how it is created and disseminated as well as who can comment on it and when.
User Management: One of the largest factors in determining the success of a site is who becomes part of its community. The term who in this case is used very loosely, because you will find that any content related site is a target for malicious users, bots and spammers, and how you control the use of a site leads directly to how appealing the target audience will find it.
Reports: Think of reports as your eyes and ears on the ground. They play an invaluable role in keeping you informed of what is happening behind the scenes. They help to keep you aware of important system updates, potential dangers or malicious use of a site, and much more.
Site Building: Divided into four main sections, this category powers the development of the site's functionality and features, and allows you to determine how that functionality is presented. Modifications to this section, especially to the Modules, can impact all other parts of the site and you will find that changes here require revisits to the other main categories because new modules invariably mean new site features. More on Modules in Chapter 3.
Site Configuration: This category contains a grab bag of features that can be used to alter the way in which a site deals with a variety of different issues ranging from performance and logging, to images, triggers, and maintenance.
The price one pays for having a powerful and flexible system like Drupal is that it comes with, necessarily, a huge amount of options and parameters that need to be understood and implemented. Spending time learning and experimenting with these is one of the things that will take you from novice to pro. Ultimately, I'm sure you will agree that the organization of this array of features within Drupal makes it quite intuitive.
Right now, it's time to a have a quick bit of fun before we get to the more serious matter of building a site in the next chapter.
Since the administration section is where the business of building and running a Drupal site occurs, let's take a look at what that page provides and how it is organized. Clicking on this link (or Administer in the main menu) brings up the admin page as shown by the following screenshot:
The admin page can be viewed either By task as shown here or By module. Either way, whatever you view here can be found in the Administer menu on the left-hand side. At the moment, viewing the admin section By task is probably more intuitive but at a later stage you might find that having direct access to specific modules is more efficient, and in this case, the By module view will probably be more suitable. Administration is broken up into five main categories that cover all the aspects of running the site.
Content Management: Fundamentally, content management is the most important aspect of any large site because it directly determines how easy or hard it is for users to access the information they are looking for. This section gives a broad and fine grained control over what content the site can present, how it is organized, how it is created and disseminated as well as who can comment on it and when.
User Management: One of the largest factors in determining the success of a site is who becomes part of its community. The term who in this case is used very loosely, because you will find that any content related site is a target for malicious users, bots and spammers, and how you control the use of a site leads directly to how appealing the target audience will find it.
Reports: Think of reports as your eyes and ears on the ground. They play an invaluable role in keeping you informed of what is happening behind the scenes. They help to keep you aware of important system updates, potential dangers or malicious use of a site, and much more.
Site Building: Divided into four main sections, this category powers the development of the site's functionality and features, and allows you to determine how that functionality is presented. Modifications to this section, especially to the Modules, can impact all other parts of the site and you will find that changes here require revisits to the other main categories because new modules invariably mean new site features. More on Modules in Chapter 3.
Site Configuration: This category contains a grab bag of features that can be used to alter the way in which a site deals with a variety of different issues ranging from performance and logging, to images, triggers, and maintenance.
The price one pays for having a powerful and flexible system like Drupal is that it comes with, necessarily, a huge amount of options and parameters that need to be understood and implemented. Spending time learning and experimenting with these is one of the things that will take you from novice to pro. Ultimately, I'm sure you will agree that the organization of this array of features within Drupal makes it quite intuitive.
Right now, it's time to a have a quick bit of fun before we get to the more serious matter of building a site in the next chapter.
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