drupal

We are referring to url aliases. A url alias is a replacement url for another url. Usually this is done to make things easier and make more sense for you and the people browsing your site, not to mention the search engines. The default urls usually have wierd stuff like "?q=node" but drupal is very nice to convert this sort of thing into something that makes sense.

Below are useful built-in aliases, ready to take you to important pages. Just type the alias into your browser's address bar, after <your site domain>.

Taking care of problems and keeping your site running well.

Maintenance and Construction Notices

Sometimes you'll want to put up an "under construction" sign, or even make your site invisible, while you make big upgrades to the content (or just run experiments). Here are a couple of choices:

Placing an "Under Construction" sign

Blocks are the chunks of text or information that appear on the left and/or right sides of site pages. (Some site layouts can also sport blocks at the top and the bottom of pages.) Drupal provides many ready-to-use blocks with useful information, such as links to popular content; you can create your own blocks as well.

The Blocks administration form

There's a handy form for working with blocks:

What appears on the site's front page, the first page people see when visiting <your site domain>?

Many web sites, especially blogs, list a number of postings, articles, or other nodes on the front page, usually with the most recent node at top. If the nodes have short text, the page may display the title and whole text of the nodes. If the nodes have long text, the page may display the title and a short excerpt ("teaser"); visitors can click on a title, or a "Read more" link, to display the whole node as a page.

You'll often want to make a page not from a single node, but from a list of several nodes. I haven't yet come across a technical Drupal word for such a page, so I'll call it a 'node-list page'.

There's not much to cover here. As already discussed, when you create a node, Drupal automatically gives it a path (like node/53), or you can give it a path yourself (like product_catalog).

To create a page from that node, then, you don't really need to do anything special. Just go to the node's path (presumably via a menu item you've created for the purpose), and Drupal will whip up a page centered around that node, surrounded by the blocks, graphical elements, footer, and other accountrements you've set up for the site.

Here I'll cover how to place your nodes – your Story nodes, Page nodes, Blog Entry nodes etc. – onto a page in your site.

Hmm? Isn't it a little late in the manual to be writing about putting content on pages? And haven't we already covered the topic here and there?

Yes, there's been some discussion already, such as how to create a Story node or Page node, and how to "promote" these to the site's front page. But there's more to the story.

The Menus administration form is one place where you can create menu items (see Working with Menus: Administration Page).

There's another way to create a menu item: when you create or edit a node, you can create a menu item for it on the fly.

For example, you create a node with company information, and want a link to that node to appear in a menu called 'site menu'. You could create the node, head to the Menus administration form, and create a new menu item within the menu called 'site menu'.

Menus are the key to your site – they're the way by which visitors get at your content.

A menu is a list of links to content. Menus can appear in a horizontal line at the top of your pages, as with many web site designs. Or they can appear along the sides in blocks, another common design.

A specific link in a menu – a "menu item" – can link to a specific node. Or, calling on the full power of the database behind your site, it can pull up a list of nodes based on some criterion.

There's a big administration form for all menus on your site:

Links are how visitors get from one page to another. You'll probably put a lot of links in menus – a menu being just a list of links to other content. But you may also place links directly inside content text, or inside a block's text.

You may want links that point to a specific content item on your site, or a specific page on an outside web site. Or you may want powerful links that pick up and return a list of multiple content items from your site's database.

There's a lot you can do. Here's a basic guide to linking: