Important Administration pages in your Drupal site

If you’ve ever tried to get around in a Drupal site using the default Navigation Block you’ve probably realized just how confusing the default system can be. So to simplify things, we created our own navigation system with a more intuitive structure and hid the default navigation from sight. Of course since these menus are for administration of the website we limit the visibility of these menus by user role, so that only users that have Administration privileges can see them. If we built your site for you, then you should have something very similar, but if you are just visiting this site, please refer to the image to your right for an idea of what we are talking about. For more information on creating new menus and menu items in Drupal, please refer to our menu tutorial.

We have divided the main administration functions into two menus; Content Management and Site Management.

The Content Management menu is where you go to manage the text in your website. You can:

• Create content: This page can also be reached by going to node/add. Add a new page from the content types that have been created on your website. I like to keep this menu expanded so that the user can choose which content type that they wish to create directly.
• View existing content: This page can also be reached by going to admin/content/node. See a list of pages that have already been created with the option of filtering the List by content type, and publish status.
• Edit blocks: This page can also be reached by going to admin/build/block. Add new blocks, delete blocks, enable existing blocks, move block to new sections, configure visibility options and more.
• Edit Menus: This should be fairly self explanatory. This page allows you to add menus, add items (links) into those menus, and edit them when necessary.
• Edit categories: This page can also be reached by going to admin/content/taxonomy Categories are like sections of vocabularies that hold the terms, or key words used to describe the pages that you create on your website. For instance a Category might be something like colors and the terms in that category might be blue, red, green, etc… Categories are very important in organizing the content for your website and creating intuitive user interfaces.
• Edit content types: This page can also be reached by going to admin/content/types. This is essentially the main interface for using CCK (Content Creation Kit.) CCK allows you to create new content types each with their own unique layout and it allows you to edit existing content types by adding new fields or changing their respective labels.

The Site Management menu covers most of the administration functions for your site related to the way your site actually works.

• Administer: This page can also be reached by going to admin. Links to the standard Drupal Administration page. I don’t use this page very often, but sometimes it is useful.
• Configure Modules: This page can also be reached by going to admin/by-module. Takes you to a page where you can edit the settings for the various modules in use on your site.
• Add or Remove Modules: This page can also be reached by going to admin/build/modules.
• Enable or disable modules. This page also provides the option of uninstalling disabled modules (which completely removes all database information that has been saved by that particular module) and the database update script (which should be run each time a module is updated to insure that the database works properly.)
• Edit Site Information: This page can also be reached by going to admin/settings/site-information. This page allows you to edit important site information such as site name, home page, administration email etc…
• Themes: This page can also be reached by going to admin/build/themes. Switch themes and configure certain options for each particular theme including default logo, whether user pictures will show on their post or not and more. Be careful when you do this that you have made the necessary adjustments on your template files (or have hired someone to make the adjustments) before you enable some of the features here. Enabling user pictures on post can have very unexpected results if the theme in question was not designed with user pictures in mind.
• User Management: This page can also be reached by going to admin/user. Most everything you will ever need for controlling what users are able to do on your site.
• Site Status Report: This page can also be reached by going to admin/logs/status. Gives an overview of the current status of certain crucial components of your website. Here you might find errors if your site needs maintenance.
• Site Logs: This page can also be reached by going to admin/logs/watchdog. Watchdog is the Drupal module which keeps ongoing logs of all site activity including user searches, missing pages, and completed cron task.