Additional Tips and Tricks

These pages are full of miscellaneous suggestions. Some are useful, some may not be. Help us organize by editing and moving as needed.

• Go to the Administration >> Site configuration >> Site information page. Many people don't like, when they visit a site, being called "Anonymous" so you might want to change the designation to "Visitor."
• If there are any modules (core or contributed) that you want to use, go ahead and enable them. Many people do recommend turning on (enabling) the "Path" core module so you can use "normal" names for your pages.
• The same goes for themes.

There are a few things that are commonly recommended for almost all sites, so this is a good time to do it:

• Turn on "CLEAN URLS" to make your site more user friendly. Go to Administration >> Site configuration >> Clean URLs. At the bottom of the verbiage there is a link to run the "Clean URLs Test." If it passes, then the "Enable" radio button will un-dim. Click on that. (If the URLs stop working for some reason here are instructions to unset clean URLs.)
• While preparing the site's initial content, it might be useful to go to Administration >> Site configuration >> Input formats and set "Full HTML" as the default, but only until the site is ready to go live (then it needs to be set back to "Filtered HTML" for security reasons). Then you may still allow administrators to use that format. Do this now and you will avoid a very common problem with building your site.
• Many people don't like having "Promoted to front page" as a default for content, so go to Administration >> Content management >> Content types and turn that off - in each content type.
• While you're there, decide on your default comment mode. Go to Administration >> Content management >> Comments >> Settings (Administration >> Content management >> Post settings in Drupal 6) and set the comments to be entered on a "separate page" and make sure that "Preview comment" is set to "Required."

If you want to use the contact form to email anyone from the site, be sure to enable the "Contact" module (see Adding a Contact Form).

• Now, let's turn on the Contact form so your users can send you a message. Go to Administration >> Site building >> Menus and locate the "Contact" item (it should listed be under the "Navigation" menu). Click on the "enable" link. Remember that later on you will want to go to Administration >> Site building >> Contact form and finish setting that up.