By ckeck on

I couldn't find anything directly relevant in the forums recently, so exuse me if this has been discussed.

I just got Drupal installed, but I cannot seem to figure out quite how this all works...take for example the Drupal page itself...are things like the search bar and tabs at the top built in automatically? I cannot find those tabs anywhere...

And whenever I create new content (static page) it just shows up like a blog post on the front page...how do I make it a seperate page??

Any and all help is appreciated...I have my site uploaded @ www.toolforums.net (just a test domain at the moment)...

I seem to be lost somewhere...or am missing something obvious...

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

alexd-1’s picture

alexd-1 commented

It can be a hard to get started. Once you're going, it starts to make sense. I found it very useful to watch the videocasts on menu creation, etc. - They give you an idea of how things fit together which then apply to all aspects:

http://drupal.org/node/63155

elfur’s picture

elfur commented

For starters yes, yes and yes :)

The Drupal system pretty much puts things in place for you - until you decide to move them :)

Re. the search bar, you decide if it's published and where it's placed by heading over to the blocks config page (administer >> blocks).

Re. the tabs, that's just styling of primary links so you can play with that in your style sheet (style for ul#primary-links)

Re. the static page, you have the option to decide whether any individually created nodes (pages, stories, blog entries, book pages, images or whatever nodetype you have) will appear on the front page or not. While creating the page look for the link "Publishing Options" just above the submit button. By clicking it, you're expanding a few publishing options, one of which is the "promoted to front page" check box - uncheck and voilà. To have it unchecked by default head over to administer >> settings >> content types - and there you have the option to configure a few things on each node type (content type).

When you finally think you're ready to start playing with the theme itself, I reccommend you download the channel nine theme and hack that to pieces, because that assists you with understanding the concept of different areas of the web page being accessible from the block section. (Caveat. other themes might do the exact same thing, but I like the idea of four column layout and it assisted me with understanding this :)) - start looking at page.tpl.php, there you see all the variables that you can toy with (oh and then of course you realise later that you can toy with many more, but babysteps first :))

Now there are of course a few articles I think you should read (and plenty more I don't know about :)) so start with these:

  • About the views module - a kickass module to assist with working out the display of data
  • The customisation section of the handbook is also a very good place to start
  • And then there's the Basic theme help which is a good place to start reading about themes.

By this time you'll have about a thousand other questions, but they will probably be more to the point and easier to search for using the search field. In the meantime, just follow the threads and the responses to them ... which is always a good way to learn things anyway.

/elfur.is