Your Administrator Tools

Once logged in, things will look different: you'll see a menu at the top of your site with your user name at the right, and a full list of links that drop down to more links. This is the Administrator menu, with links to content creation and administration forms that let you control nearly every aspect of your site.

The Administrator menu

There are many separate forms for administrative settings. The quickest way to get there is via the Navigation menu.

The Navigation menu shows up as a block on your site when you are logged in as an administrator.

Menu Items

You'll see many items under that Administrator menu, including two that you'll be using a lot: Create content and Administer.

Content management and Administer both conceal many options underneath. Roll your cursor over them to see what appears.

When you roll over Content management in the Navigation menu, you'll see links drop down under it of which Create content is one you will become familiar with. Click on or simply roll over Create content and more links listing the types of content you can create will appear.

When you roll over your favicon (the icon in the left corner) more links will drop down, click on Administer, you'll see a very extensive "Administer" page, displaying sub-categories of administration tasks and the links to specific tasks.

Almost everything you need to do to create and manage content, and manage your site as a whole, can be found in the links under Create content and Administer.

Referring to Administration pages

To send you to a specific page for administrators, I'll write like this:

Administration menu » Content management » Create content » Page

That tells you to roll over Content management then down to Create content and then click Page under that. Or click Page on the page that appears when you click Create content.

Another example:

Administration menu » Site building » Blocks

That tells you to roll over Site building in the Administration menu, then Blocks under that. Or click Blocks under Site building on the page that appears when you click Administer.

What you and others see

On many sites, general visitors who are not logged in don't see the Administration menu. However, it is possible to give general visitors some administrative ability, and access to the appropriate administrator blocks, if you wish.

In any case, any user who sees the Administration menu will only be shown links for those functions he has permission to access.

Seeing what visitors see

If you're logged in as an administrator and would like to see your site as visitors do, without the Administration menu, just log out and look. Or even better, use two separate browsers, one logged in and one not logged in. After making changes in one browser, switch to the other (non-logged in) browser, refresh the appropriate page, and see how things look.