Content Creation in Drupal

It is a true and boring common-place that one cannot find a good description about Drupal. What you can find on web it is complicated, you don’t get answers, they aren’t useful at all. So we decided to make a short, understandable documentation of Drupal for beginners. We believe that a clear manual will increase the Drupal’s success, too. From the first piece of the documentation you can find out how you can post content on a Drupal-based site. I hope this would convince those, too who hesitate which CMS (content management system) should they choose.

With Drupal you can create almost everything: a simple blog or a complex news site, with several columns, images, videos and so on. Moreover, Drupal is so flexible that you can choose between several different solutions, depending on your taste, knowledge or other criteria as speed, etc. I agree with those who think that Drupal is more than a simple content management system: is a development environment.

How can one explain such a complex system as Drupal in an understandable and moreover, in a short way?

What makes this possible is the strict and simple order behind the apparent chaos. If you recognize this order, you know almost everything about Drupal. Let’s take a look on the main principles of content management in Drupal.

Everything is node?

On web sites created with Drupal, the 99% of the content is so-called node. You should imagine the relationship between the web site and the nodes as that one between the computer and the files. It might be a surprise but on a computer we always manipulate files, even then when we watch a movie or work with a complex excel spreadsheet. We create, open, edit and delete only files. If you navigate on the hard disk of your computer you go through directories till you reach at a file. The same stands for Drupal: if you navigate on a site, the final destination always will be a node.

Now we can answer the question: yes, in Drupal almost everything is a node.

New node?

There is no menu titled New node, don’t look after it. Moreover, as Drupal basic configuration is really flexible you can have a site without any menu (this isn’t very probable, but you can see the flexibility of the system).

However unique may be the site’s construction, you will always find a page where you can create new content.If your site is http://oldal.hu, then you can create content on (http://oldal.hu)?q=/node/add/

Content, type and … node

On a computer there are files with .doc and .mp3 extension.

• Those files have the following common properties: they are composed from data, they have a name, creation and other date and they can be found in a directory.

• Those files are differentiated by the way their data are interpreted by different applications and by the different libraries where they are stored.

Simliarly, on a Drupal web site there are nodes, which

• have the following common properties: type, title and date

• differ in the mode they appear to the visitors of the page.

In Drupal with default configuration there are two types of node:

• Story

• Page

If you copy this address (http://oldal.hu)?q=/node/add/ into your browser’s address bar, you will see two links to the two node types.

Story and page – default content types in Drupal

Nodes which type is story can be displayed on different pages, in different order and amount. With default installation this page will be the main page of the site, the stories will be ordered by date (the latest story will be on the top of the page followed by the earlier ones). In our example this will be http://oldal.hu.

The whole content of the story usually does not appear on these pages, only a lead or a teaser. Just like in newspapers or in the big online portals as the Index.hu. Just like a directory in a computer’s file manager, where you can see there only a title and a short lead (icon) of the files.

If you click on the title (or the icon), the file opens. If you click on the title in Drupal, the “full view” of the node opens.

So, if you want to create new content on your main page, create a story!

The other content type, the page, doesn’t have an equivalent on computer, because it has only “full” view.

How can we use the page?

I think you already asked the question: Why do we need page if have story?

There is at least an About section on every web site, which yearns for a page: it changes rarely and there is no need to put a teaser on the main page. And you can have several other pages which are not updated regularly.

How to create a new page and a new story

On the ?q=/node/add/ page you should choose which content type you want to use. If you click on Story or Page, you land on a page where you can edit the content (if you choose story: ?q=/node/add/story, in the case of the page: ?q=/node/add/page). The two editing pages are similar: you must give a title and write the content of the body. If you are ready, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the Submit button. With the Preview button you can check how your story or page will look after saving (attention: after checking the preview you have to save it, otherwise your entire work will be lost).

And that’s all. If you created a page, you got a page, if a story, then you have a new page and a lead on the main page.

Create a menu

Even with a default configuration you can make the nodes (whether a page or a story) reachable for the visitors. A new menu element can be defined with a field right under the body box (on the creation page of story or page). As you can see on the image, you can set title, description, parent menu and weight (which defines the order of the menu elements in the list) for the menu.

A lot of other fields could be found on a pimped Drupal site, that will be discussed in another post together with the complex menu-system.

Unique content types

In Drupal it’s possible to define other content types, so you shouldn’t be surprised if you find other links under story and page on ?q=/node/add/. Using these content types it is easier (among many other things) to create other thematic pages. However, these new content types remain nodes like the default ones, so they can be created and edited similarly. You know, title, body, etc…

I will present them in details soon.

How to display the nodes?

Congratulations! If you are still reading this, then you know everything what a beginner should know about the content management in Drupal. I think you are interested how the nodes and the other components of a Drupal site are related. I will resume this shortly, focusing on the most important features:

• menus. Every node can be included in a menu (as presented above)
• categories.* By default this module is inactive. If you activate it, you can define your own categories and connect them with different content types. The module is called Taxonomy. It’s like a column in a magazine. Every node can be assigned to one or more categories which will appear as a text link under the body. If you click on it, you arrive on a page where you find every node assigned to the same category. You can create even a menu item for them (but that is a little bit more complicated).

• views. It’s enough to know that views help to organize the nodes in different pages and blocks. They are really useful and flexible. The Views module is not included in the default configuration of Drupal, you must install it separately.

And of course, there are many other extra modules, as the really complex panels, and others. I don’t know every module, but with the combination of the presented features you can solve everything a web site may need. In the next posts I will go deeper and explain them in detail.