By kilday on

As the newly designated administrator for my fishing club's site (cherokeechaptertu.org), I am wanting to get a good overview of how to fully utilize the administrator's abilities and edit the site. I have no previous site admin experience & little technical computer programming knowledge. Can you recommmend a good place for me to start learning the ropes?

Thanks, John

Comments

barrett’s picture

barrett commented

http://drupal.org/getting-started

kilday’s picture

kilday commented

Well I didn't go through the manual, as I no doubt should have. The previous admin (the fella that set up the site) gave me a few tips and encouraged me in that the site was pretty easy (relative term...I know) to make changes to. So in I went and here are a couple of snags I've hit:

The site that I have volunteered to keep up: http://www.cherokeechaptertu.org/?q=node (running Drupal v5.2)

1) About a week or so ago, I wanted to edit the home page & the forums. Previous admin contact mentioned the simple steps and also the 'Open Rich Editor' feature. (The FCKeditor is configured/enabled on the site. I have no idea what FCK stands for, but my dealings with it to date have me muttering a certain similar word...) I open it up and start editing. By the way, I'm browsing via Firefox's 3.0.5. (I think - I just auto-upgraded to 3.0.6 today so 3.0.5 is my guess)

So I successfully edit the forums and am in process of editing home page, having trouble figuring out how to modify the display font (it suddenly changed on me; no idea how) when the browser shuts down. When I open it back up, the content on the home page has changed to include several elements that were previously located at other locations in the site. So I'm wanting to edit the content & if possible, move the unwanted elements/sections back to where they were. I wonder if there's a map feature that would show where they were previously... Luckily I have a SnagIt file of the previous home page that I'm wanting the general look retro'd to.

2) Then yesterday, I go into trying to figure out how to configure the site so that photo images may be uploaded from users directly to the site...and not converting them to a link; but actually displaying the image. So I go into admin configure settings such as 'file upload', FKCeditor (HTML filters, etc), even 'modules' and 'views'. I toggled on/off a few to see if they would work; added Only local images are allowed. tag to the Filtered HTML list, etc. Now, the comment views are all screwy. The content looks to be there still, just with a bunch of code displayed as well. Hopefully there's a simple setting I can reconfigure to correct this.

I have a feeling that a novice such as myself is going to have to do some real homework before editing & tinkering with the site. CRASH comes to mind .. as does security.

Thanks for anybody willing to try to help me out -

John Kilday, Administrator
CherokeeChapterTU.org

oneiropolos’s picture

oneiropolos commented

I am not the most experienced admin out there (far form it actually :P) but
"Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6" was a very good starter for me
and a small advice: try to make the descriptions shorter and your help requests very specific :)

Good luck my friend!

kilday’s picture

kilday commented

Right, oneiro. Sorry for the run-on descriptions, just thought details might be germane to the situation & I'm not a website/programming person at all; so I'm describing to the best of my ability. I too hate sludge.

Re starter point: building blocks of knowledge important no doubt & I will be investing time with such in future. Just trying to get site presentable again while I learn the ropes.

joachim’s picture

joachim commented

Sounds like you like to tinker... maybe get yourself a local installation of Drupal (very simple with Xampp on windows, for instance) and play with that rather than break your site figuring out what things do! :)

kilday’s picture

kilday commented

Yep...a regular tinkerTom here. Thanks for the suggestion...