northStudio

Adding Content

In Drupal, adding content is made easy. On the main navigation menu, you will see a link that says 'Create Content'. If it's not in the navigation menu, you can find it on the black menu at the very top of the page (if you have one there) by hovering over 'Content Management' > 'Content', and select whichever content type you want to add content for. If you don't have the black administration menu, you can, at the very least, find 'Create Content' by going into the Administration page.

The FCKEditor is in place to allow ease of editing (and creating) for content. The only fields you will usually fill out are the 'Title' and 'Body' fields, unless told otherwise by the northStudio employees who've designed and developed your Drupal site.

Managing and Editing Content

Content is managed in Drupal almost as easy as it is created. To manage content, go into Administration, then to 'Content'. If you're using the administration menu at the top of the page, hover over 'Content Management', then click on 'Content' (as opposed to hovering, which is what you do to bring up the sub-menu to add content of a certain type). Additionally, if you wanted to hover over 'Content' instead of clicking on it, you could just click on 'List' in the sub-menu.

If you wanted to edit a specific page, most Drupal sites have an 'Edit' button right on the page itself (only shows if you're logged in and have the permissions to edit it, unless the button was removed by the one who developed the site).

The page that comes up now is the content management page. Let's start with the functions, starting from the top of the page and working downwards.

The first thing you will see is "Show only items where", and there will be a series of dropdown boxes below it. The labels for the boxes read as follows: 'Status' and 'Type'. If you have any taxonomy (categories), there will be an additional box there for selecting the taxonomy. The purpose of these two (or three) boxes is to filter the listing of all content on your Drupal site based on certain criteria (whether the content is published or not, whether it's a page or a different content type). When you have multiple pages of content, this feature is a miracle for easily finding the content that you want to edit.

Selecting an item in the dropdown boxes and clicking on 'Filter' will select that criteria. You can further narrow your search by selecting more criteria and clicking on 'Refine'. The 'Undo' button will take off the last criteria you entered, and 'Reset' will reset the entire thing. So, an example of a narrowed-down criteria would be: Status is -PUBLISHED- *and* Type is -NEWS ARTICLE- *and* Taxonomy is -BED AND BREAKFASTS IN CANADA-. This will first single out all content that is published. It will then further single out all content that is a news article and remove the other content types from the list. Then it will display all news articles related to bed and breakfasts in Canada.

Not all the boxes have to be selected, though. They also don't have to be refined in the order the boxes appeared. If I wanted, I could display based on the criteria that the content type belongs to the -BED AND BREAKFASTS IN CANADA- taxonomy, but leave the other two boxes empty. This would display all content that has the taxonomy -BED AND BREAKFASTS IN CANADA- whether or not they're published, and whether or not it's a news article.

The next item on the list is "Update options". What you do is you check the box beside the name of the content and then choose an option in the dropdown box here and it will apply the changes to the selected nodes.

• 'Update path alias' will make sure that all the nodes (content) have correct addresses (this is mainly for SEO purposes, but it also makes navigation easier).
• 'Unpublish' will make it so the selected nodes get unpublished and can no longer be seen by the public. This option should be used in place of entirely deleting a node.
• 'Promote to front page' will make the node show on the front page of your Drupal site. This is good for news articles that are new or important.
• 'Demote from front page' will remove the node from the front page.
• 'Make sticky' will make the node stick to the top of any lists it happens to be on.
• 'Remove stickiness' will remove the node from the top of lists it's on (unless it would otherwise be at the top of the list).
• 'Delete' will delete the node, and this option should never be used. Unpublish your unwanted nodes, instead. That way, if you ever decide you want it back, you can just publish it again. Also, you will still be able to access the unpublished nodes (but regular users won't be able to).

Clicking on the 'Update' button will apply the selected option to the selected nodes.