By jazz88guy on

Sorry for the ignorant questions. I have no experience with Drupal. I've been asked by a small company to administer it's website. It was built by a large website developer in Drupal 6 and has been active for about a year. No one at the company really knows anything about it. It's just sitting there. I have helped this company with another of it's websites that is on "Square space" which has a very user-friendly web browser interface. I'm really a photographer/graphics person, but I could easily change the content on Square space as it is mostly WYSIWYG. I don't know much html or other coding. I have the admin password and have poked around the site a bit but I find it slightly daunting.

First, is there any reason I should download Drupal to my own computer? I will be changing content but not building a new site. Can I do everything I need through the web browser interface?

Much of the content I need to change is images. Is there a place where all of the images are stored? How do I upload new images to the website?

Thanks for you patience with a total beginner.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

nevets’s picture

nevets commented

You can change content from the web interface. As for changing images, it depends on which ones and how the site was built.

chales’s picture

chales commented

First, Drupal has a bit of a learning curve and secret handshakes that you only learn over time from experience. Since there's about 100+ ways to do anything in Drupal and you are green there's just not a lot of guidance someone can give on the fly like this.

There are some great learning resources out there. For books just look at Amazon and read the reviews for a beginner book. Try Using Drupal as a good starting point.

There's also a lot of videos on YouTube, Vimeo, and also Drupal specific sites such as Drupalize.me which is a pay service but offers a lot of FREE introductory level vids.

Look in your area for a nearby "Drupal user group" and ask for help there. Meetups are a great place to find locals that can give you advice and put you on the right track.

To your question about the site, ideally yes you would have a local copy to test with or a copy to use as a staging environment to test your changes. I don't want to scare you too badly but depending on how the site is built it could be very easy to break things. You will want to vist your modules page and take a look at what's installed, go to yoursite.com/admin/build/modules to see the list and then look them up and read a little detail about the module from it's project page description. This will help you figure out how images are managed on the site. It may be simple file attachments or something much more advanced.

If the site has been sitting a while it likely needs some updates. Take a look at the status page and the available updates page, yoursite.com/admin/reports/status and yoursite.com/admin/reports/updates respectively.

Hope that helps.

DrupalVoodoo