Drupal Administration

Once you’ve created a page for your site you are probably going to want to add a link to that page at some point. If you had a Drupal developer like myself build your site then you probably already have a couple of menus in place already, but what happens if you want to add a new one?

Well, you can call me and have me do it, but in my opinion that would an expensive option especially since Drupal 6 makes it extremely easy to do yourself.

One of the first questions people ask me after I show them how to create a page in Drupal is “So where is the page now?”. It’s a simple question but the real answer is a little bit difficult for laymen to grasp at first. You see Drupal doesn’t create new files when it creates a new page, so the page doesn’t exist in a folder on the server where you could go download it as is true with some other content management systems. Drupal stores the information to create the page that you see by storing the necessary information in several places in the database.

The Drupal Webform module by Nathan Haug aka “quicksketch” is in my book rates up there in the top ten most important Drupal modules in existence and it’s not that hard to use once you understand how it works. This is a brief tutorial designed to help people get a handle on the Webform module quickly so they can start using it to add web forms to their website. Note: This tutorial is written in the context of Drupal 6. There may be minor differences for Drupal 5 installations.

Taxonomy is not a common word to hear in the English language, so chances are if you haven’t dedicated your life to studying the mating habits of African dung beetles or tinkering with Drupal then you may not have even heard the word before. Taxonomy refers to a system of classification used to group similar items. In Drupal Taxonomy is used to group your pages by the subject matter or by other criteria so that they can later be sorted into page listings (using the Views module) or manipulated in some other fashion.

Adding a new page to a Drupal website is probably the easiest thing you can do in Drupal, none the less there are a couple of important things to be aware of so I am writing this to help beginners understand.