Setup Drupal

Get Drupal.org log in

In order to get maximum benefit from the drupal.org site, including the ability to do a filtered search through the many themes and modules, you must create a login if you haven't already.

Configure your website

Go to our site to set it up for users: http://webclass.wwu.openaccess.org/project by walking through each of the sections below.

1. Select administration section link on the setup page. You will have at least one error, marked in red, in the status report so look for that now.
   1. Cron has not been run so click run cron manually . Cron is the timekeeper for Drupal.
   2. Using FZ, remove write permissions for .sites/default/settings.php file by changing it to 644
   3. If you think you fixed the errors, refresh the page.
2. If you have any other errors, fix them as well.

Setup Site Configuration (Administer, Site Configuration)

• Site Information - set site name and notice the banner changes. I suggest the folder name such as "Drupal" or "Project"

Setup User Management (Administer, User Management)

The basic guideline is to give each type of user access to ONLY what they need to participate in the site the way they should. As you add content types and modules and blocks you will need to return to this area to continue to refine each role's access.

• Users: right now you just have one user - the "user-1" or all-powerful. This is useful for setting up the site, but you will want some less powerful people as well.
• Roles: some to consider include the following
  • Anonymous / Guest - person who is not logged in - probably not a contributor but may be able to view enough to be encouraged to sign up
  • Member - person who has logged in, can contribute maybe to forums or polls and comments but maybe not to blogs or stories or pages
  • Contributor - logged in person that is associated with site owner and is adding to content - blogs, galleries, adding products, etc
  • Administrator - can do everything, bring site up and down - probably not so good for contributing content
• Access Control - after setting the roles, decide what permissions each role has
• User Settings - how do people who sign up become "authenticated" - manually by administrator or self-enrolling? (Admin can always block them later if they cause problems)
• Access Rules - you don't need this now, but this can be used to limit access from spammers.

Site Building

Enable Modules (Administer, Site Building, Modules)

Once you've installed the default Drupal installation there are still Modules available that aren't enabled, and some Modules enabled that you may not want. Make sure Menu, Search, Help, and Statistics are enabled. This is recommended under Core - optional:

• Blog
• Color
• Comment
• Contact
• Forum
• Help
• Menu
• Path
• Poll
• Taxonomy
• Upload

Site Building - set up Blocks

Blocks have to be administered each time modules are added since additional modules usually involve additional blocks. To to Site Building, Blocks and notice that the module content areas we added above (Blog, forum) are disabled, even though we added them. This is because the module adds the capability, but the Block adds a place for the data to be displayed. Check each of these areas for each block listed:

• Region - this shows what part of the page the block displays in. Note that some themes don't seem to support display of all types of blocks in all areas.
• Position - grab the cross to drag the block within its region. Things higher in the list are higher on the page.
• Configure allows you to set the title (header) for a block, set what roles can see the block, set what pages see the block, and how much control the user has over whether they can see the block.

Primary Links by default show up in Banner area - strangely enough they show up even though you don't set a Region for them.

Don't forget to click Save after making changes!

Hands On

Go to Administer, Site Building, Blocks and try moving the login block to the sidebar or to the header. Enable the Who's Logged in block and then set position of this and the login block to decide which one appears first. You might want to have one person in the group logged in as a regular user, and another logged in on a different computer as the administrator for quickly testing how this works.

Site Building - set up Menus

Note on Content Types:

• Page (static), Story (article), Book (wiki)
• Others: Blog, Forum, Poll, Product etc
• Set up Primary Menus with static pages like "About the Author" or other topics that you always want available.

Set up a Tab for Yourself

1. First create a page: Administer, Create Content, Page
   1. Add title (shows up at top of page)
   2. Body (content of page)
   3. URL path settings (such as marie so you can find the page again)
2. Then add it to navigation: Administer, Site Building, Menus, Primary Links, Add item:
   1. path = value from 1.3 above (marie)
   2. Menu link title: Marie or Marie's page

Set up additional functionality with Contributed Modules