Getting Drupal up and Running

This tutorial is designed for the CVS HEAD tree as of Dec 30, 2003.

This tutorial assumes that you have successfully installed drupal and are ready to creat your first user account. If you haven't made it this far yet, be sure to revisit the INSTALL file that comes with drupal as well as the online documentation.

Creating the superuser account

The first step after a successful installation is to create the superuser account. This account allows an user to bypass all Drupal permissions and perform any action on the site. Only one account can be the superuser account, and it is strongly recommended that this account is used only when necessary and not for everyday use. The first account you create in Drupal will be the superuser account.

Go to the main page of your Drupal site and click the Create new account link

Click the Create new account link

Enter an username and E-mail address for the superuser, which in most cases be yourself. After clicking the Create new account button and submitting the information, you receive a special message about the power of the account just created and a login button to click and enter the site.

After you login, you probably want to change your password to something that's a bit more personal. Change your password and any other account settings you wish. When you're finished here, we jump into administering the site.

Where's the Admin Interface?

The admin interface is accessible in your user block which organizes all the actions you can perform on the site. Since your the superuser, you have access to the admin interface via the Administer link.

Accessing the admin interface.

You'll notice that in the admin interface the site still maintains the same look and feel of the current theme.

Since your logged in as superuser, you get the 'Administer' link which is the entry point into the admin interface. Go ahead and click on it. By default the admin interface displays a briefing of the most recent system events on your site. These are called messages, and will come in very handy when users are reporting problems and detecting suspicious activity on the site.

Underneath the Administer navigation tree is seven links. Here is an overview of each section:

• content- manage all content that has been posted to the site. You can also navigate to a particular item of content and edit from there as well. In most cases this is an easier approach unless you need to do batch content editing. You can also set global properties for your content here, such as which content types (such as books, stories, and pages) have comments or revision control enabled by default.
• comments- By default the comment module is enabled in drupal. Here you can manage and moderate comments.
• accounts- Create and modify users, user groups(in drupal it's called roles), and set role permissions. We'll visit this section shortly.
• configuration- This is the most important part of the administration interface for the administrator. You control site-wide settings, themes, blocks, the installation and configuration of modules, as well as filters for submitted content. Get familiar with this section, folks.
• taxonomy- Manage how content (even images) are categorized.
• messages- Detailed site monitoring statistics. The initial admin screen is the brief version of what you see here.
• help- Drupal documentation.

Setting Permissions

Drupal's default install is locked down pretty tight and nobody except the superuser has permission to view content. If that doesn't float yer boat, then let's take a look at changing it.

Navigate to administer » accounts » permissions. This page shows rows of permissions that each role can perform. By default there are two roles: anonymous user and authenticated user. The anonymous user is any user that visits your site and is not logged in or doesn't have an account. So with a clean drupal install, nobody can do 'nuthin except the superuser. The authenticated user role is the default role a user is assigned when after they create an account.

If you want a site that's open to the public, you'll want to check the access content permission under anonymous user. Most permissions can be divided up into two categories: access and administer. Access permissions control whether or not a role is allowed to view some form of content. Administer permissions generally control features such as modifying and configuring a feature. Be warned that some permissions are dependent on each other. For example, if you check 'administer site configuration' but not 'access administration pages', you'll never make it to the site configuration interface. Currently the only way to figure out these dependencies is through sheer determination and common sense.

A Crash Course in Module Management

You've probably already got a couple of modules you want to install or uninstall. To do that go to: administer » configuration » modules. If the 'status' column is checked, it means the module is installed. To disable it, uncheck the column. To enable a module, simply check the column.

What really happens when I enable a module?

Each module has the ability to build it's own configuration page. These pages live under administer » configuration » modules. Usually after you enable a module, this is the first place you want to look in order to tweak the new component.

A module also has the ability to add it's own permissions into drupal. For example, adding the path module will create two new permissions for you to manage.

Modules can also add new filters, blocks and even their own independent links. Sometimes after you install a module, you mat need to go to the help link and learn more about the newly enabled component.

Matt, respond to these questions:

I installed Drupal, but I would need some more detailled Tutorial, than the Documentation on this website. I could create some pages and they are visible in the main navigation block, but I don't know how to deal with Taxonomy, how to link the pages between each other...Is there a very basic Tutorial about using Drupal somewhere? Thank you very much!

I would also include a "usual suspects" sections for trouble shooting errors. Things to answer questions like "Why does it keep going back to the front page" and "I didn't change module X but now it suddenly stopped working."
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c0c0c0 (aka "Dan")

From working with people, it is my experience that the first thing they want to do is (1) add some content (typically a static page) and (2) link to it from their main page.
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Dries Buytaert :: http://www.buytaert.net/