DrupalCampLA 2009 - Site Administration Basics

The Outline here is meant to come with screen-caps, which are not currently included in this web-based version. Download the PDF linked at the bottom of this page for all of the screen-caps included to walk you through site administration!

A recording of this presentation can currently be found here:
http://replay.nacs.uci.edu/public/summer2009/DxLA/Site%20Admin%20Basics%20-%20Web%20(1024x768)%20-%2020090809%2010.12.31AM.html

Session Outline

A. Assumptions
This session assumes the following:

1. You have a site built in Drupal
2. You have some kind of editor/administrative access to your site

B. Considerations
If you built your site yourself, then you have complete access to everything we discuss in this session.

If you had a web developer build your site, some of the things we cover may not be things that you have access to, as your developer may have set a role and permissions for you that limit some of your access.

If your site is a complex site (even slightly complex), there may be good reasons why your web developer has not given you all of the permissions for everything we cover in this session.

If you would like more access than your developer has given you to your site, discuss it with your developer. The unique circumstances of your site must be considered.

C. Questions for This Session
Each person has come to this session hoping to learn something specific. Would like to take a quick survey about what your specific needs are.

1. Who has a site with Drupal 6? Who has one wth Drupal 5?
2. Who has a site they built themselves? Who has a site that was built for them?
3. Please tell me some of your questions so that I can try to hit them in this session

D. Looking at Your Pages/Content To Edit
We're going to start by taking a look at a specific page to edit, in this case a local variation of the Remedee Center website mission page (part of session)

1. When on this page, click on the “Edit” Tab at the top.
2. Now you have access to the fields in your content, and you can edit your fields here. Your developer and/or Drupal core developers have probably left you some helpful instructions under each field – make sure you have read these instructions.
3. If your site has a WYSIWYG module configured, then your edit fields may have formatting buttons on them. You can turn these options on and off with the “Enable” or “Disable” rich text links underneath the fields that have these options. Some simple HTML formatting information will also be available under the field.
4. When you are done editing, make sure you Save your changes.

E. More Options Available When Editing A Node

1. Menu Settings: Automatically place your node into a menu. (Note: very specific designs might require restricted menu editing. If you can do this, do so with caution.)
2. Revision Information: Store edits as a new “revision,” to archive work. More on this later. It is a good idea to check “create a new revision” and write a note in “Log Message.” This note is to yourself and other site editors. No general user will see it.
3. URL Path Settings: If your site has Path and Path Auto enabled, you can set a custom URL for your page. Chances are you have Pathauto running on your site and your developer has set up automated rules for URL creation, so usually you will not want to do this (or you may not have permissions to). Occasionally, however, you may have a page that you want to have a very specific URL, and this is where you would set it.
4. Authoring Information: There may be times when you want to change the “author” of a piece of content (let's say you add a blog entry for a colleague) or the “date” content was published (you actually published a press release on July 3, but the event happened on July 1, so you need to pretend like it was published on a different date).
5. Publishing Options:
   1. Published – the content is visible on the site. Uncheck this if you are still working on something but want to save it.
   2. Promoted to Front Page – depending on how your site is set up, you may be using the front page to feature things. If so, then this will promote an item to it.
   3. Sticky at Top of Lists – when things are displayed in list form, such as event listings, blog entires, and the like, this control will cause that item to remain at the top of the list no matter what other sort factors are being used (such as newest content on top, alphabetical, etc.).

F. Revisions and Diff
If you create a new revision when you make edits, then you can track your revisions:

You can use this to view, and even revert to past revisions (this is much like Wikipedia). If the Diff module has been configured on your site, you can even examine the differences between two revisions.
Logging your changes can be valuable when multiple people are editing one site.

G. Finding Content In A List of Content
To see all of your content listed out in one big content list (giving you easy access to edit whatever you need to), go to Administer → Content Management → Content (unless your developer has changed the menu nav to make this easier for you to find). Alternatively, you can go to www.yourwebsiteurl.com/admin/content/node

1. “Show only items where” is a useful set of menus for filtering your content list to show only those items you want to deal with at any given time. If you have hundreds of content pieces, this list can become daunting!
   1. Status and the first drop menu allows you to select things like published, not published, promoted to front, etc.
   2. Type and the second drop menu allows to to filter by content type, such as page, blog entry or any of the custom types created by your web developer.
   3. Category and the third drop menu allows you to filter by taxonomy.
2. “Update options” makes it easy for you to batch update the status of multiple pieces of content (such as publishing, unpublishing, promoting or deleting the content) by checking the box next to the content items you want to change in the content list.

H. Taxonomy
We've talked a lot about taxonomy already in terms of sorting and assigning it to content.

So, what is Taxonomy? Whenever you see “Categories” or “Terms” you are working with Taxonmy, which is a way of creating categories and subcategories for your content. A nice introduction to taxonomy can be found on Webmaster Tips: http://tips.webdesign10.com/drupal-taxonomy-tutorial

Let's say your business has three arms: web design, photography and film (as with SunRain Productions). You may want to assign your content to the different arms, so you might create a vocab with terms for each arm, then enable that vocabulary for all of your content types.

Now that you have done so, you can enable users to browse your content by term. More advanced admins can create Views displaying content based on taxonomy specifications.

One of the sites SunRain built allows end users to enter their dreams into a content entry form, and assign their dreams to dream types such as “entertainment” or “science” or “environment” - all determined by a vocabulary. Users are then able to filter dreams by term, and see only those dreams tagged as “environment” if they choose.
Site: www.whatsyourdream.com/dream-bank

Administering your Taxonomy:
Taxonomy administration can be found in Administer → Content Management → Taxonomy or at www.yourdomainname.com/admin/content/taxonomy

On this page you can see your existing vocabularies and add new ones.

When you edit a vocabulary, you can set which content types the vocabulary will appear on, whether it is required, and whether multiple select is allowed or not (perhaps you want items to be able to be cross-referenced between terms).

If you click on “List Terms” you'll see all of the terms in your vocabulary and be able to add new ones.

It is important to note that vocabularies are often tied to backend functionality on more complex websites. If your website is more complex, edit your vocabularies with care. Adding terms should not be an issue, but deleting them, changing them, or removing a vocabulary entirely could break functionality on your site.

I. Administering Menus
*If you had a web developer build your site for you, enter this area with great care. Make sure you know why you are making changes, how it will alter the look and feel and user interface of your site, and that you test it out before you actually make the change.

To administer menus, go to Administer → Site Building → Menus or www.yoursiteurl.com/admin/built/menu
You will then get a list of all of the menus on your site. If you click on one, you will get a list of the items displayed in the menu itself:

When you add or edit a menu item, you can then set the following:

1. Path: the URL to which the link takes the user
2. Menu Link Title: the text the user sees - “About” instead of “www.url.com/about”
3. Enabled checkbox: is the menu item visible? Enabled means yes
4. Parent Item: you can change the menu or submenu of the item here, even if you are working in a specific menu already
5. Weight: how high or low does the menu item go in the list? A lower number, like 1, will be “lighter” and therefore list before a higher number (heavier) like 4.

J. User Management
You may need to add, block, or approve users.

Note: Depending on the settings on your site, you may or may not be able to do much with user management without constulting or engaging your web developer. Usually these restrictions are for security purposes. At the very least, however, you should be able to approve or block users.

To administer your users, go to Administer → User Management or
www.yoursiteurl.com/admin/user and click on “Users”

User administration is very similar to content administration. You can sort your list of users based on their role (are they an editor? An administrator?), the type of access they have to the site (e.g. sort users to only list those with permission to send newsletters), and the users' status (active or blocked).

As with content administration, you can also batch edit your users. By checking off multiple names you can block those users, approve them, or turn them all into site editors by checking the users you want to update, selecting that option in the “Update Options” drop down menu and clicking update.

The “edit” option on a user will allow you to change the user's password, email address and more.
You can also manually add a user if you would like to.

K. Administering Comments
Along with administering users, you may want to administer comments on your site.
Perhaps your site is set up to only display comments approved by an editor, which means you need to approve all comments before they go live. Perhaps someone left a message on your site that violates your terms of use or is genuinely destructive.*

Note: Comments must be enabled on your site for this to be relevant.

To administer comments, go to Administer → Content Management → Comments or
www.yoursiteurl.com/admin/content/comment

* I personally discourage deleting comments because you don't like them. Have a good reason for removing a comment. Users want to be able to express themselves, and if a removal of their comment does not seem justified, they may create a backlash against your site.

MORE ADVANCED TOPICS (if we have time)

J. Administering Blocks
“Blocks” are elements that appear on your page. Your navigation menu is a block. The items that appear in the right and left sidebars are usually blocks. Some of the things in your header or footer are blocks. Think “legos.” Really. You use them to build on top of your node to create a more complex page.

To administer your blocks, go to Administer → Site Building → Blocks or www.yoursiteurl.com/admin/build/block

Make sure you save any changes you make at the bottom of your blocks administration page or they will not keep!

When editing a block, you can specify a lot of behavioral rules for your block:

1. Block Title: the title (header) the user sees (“Mara” in the example above)
2. Custom Visibility Settings: allow users to decide if they can see the block or not
3. Show Block for Specific Roles: only allow editors to see blocks intended for editors, etc.
4. Show Block on Specific Pages: set which pages the block is actually visible on

L. Reports & Security Updates
You may occasionally want to run a status report on your site to see if your site needs security updates. Drupal is a living, breathing code base with many contributors, so security updates are not uncommon. It is good to stay on top of them.

To check on the status of your site, go to or www.yoursiteurl.com/admin/reports/status

The important things to check in your status report are:

1. Cron: which keeps the information on your site up to date. It should run hourly (or more often if you'd like). If it hasn't run, run it before continuing or your examination of your status report is not accurate.
2. Database Updates: sometimes, especially if you update a module or Drupal on your site, you also need to run database updates. You will see this warning here.
3. Drupal Core Status Updates: this will tell you if there are any important security updates, or minor updates for the core code base on your site.
4. Module and Theme Updates: same as Drupal core, this will tell you if there are any important security updates, or minor updates for the contributed modules and themes used on your site.

- Yellow = non urgent, new functionality or patches available but the version you have works
- Red = urgent, probably a security update - call your web developer for maintenance

Note: do not do these yourself unless you are absolutely confident in your backup capabilities, your test of your backup, and your ability to resolve issues should they arise. You can DESTROY YOUR SITE in the process of an upgrade. There is a session later today on Migrating a site, which will give you some of the basics to get you started on safely updating your site: 1pm in the pingVision Room
http://2009.drupalcampla.com/sessions/basics-migrating-site-stage-or-des...
if you miss the session, our outline can be found here:
http://www.sunrainproductions.com/drupalcampla/site-migration-basics

Make sure Cron is running regularly on your site. If not, either ask your web developer to make it run. There are many techniques for making this happen.

And if we really have time: How to Install and Configure Modules

Note: the more modules running on your site, the lower your performance. Additionally, some modules will conflict with others. If you had a developer build your site, I discourage you from adding modules on your own. Talk with your developer about the pros and cons of the module before taking that step.

Some Administrative-Type Modules that might be worth thinking about for your site

1. Backup and Migrate – automates database backups on your site and gives you easy “restore” options in case you destroy your database – www.drupal.org/project/backup_migrate
2. Admin Menu – a nice tool for putting an administrative drop-down menu at the top of your site page once you log in – www.drupal.org/project/admin_menu
3. Admin - a module that sets up a special theme for the administration pages on your site, making them look different and giving you easy buttons to access things – www.drupal.org/project/admin
4. Vertical Tabs – consolidates all the “excess” editing options at the bottom of your content editing screen so that they aren't as daunting – www.drupal.org/project/vertical_tabs
5. Diff – nifty little module that allows you to see the difference between revisions on your content (like wikipedia) – www.drupal.org/project/diff
6. PathAuto – enables the automation of URL aliases on your site. Hopefully already configured – www.drupal.org/project/pathauto

SESSION TAKE-AWAYS:

Take-aways from this session can be downloaded from:
www.sunrainproductions.com/drupalcampla

These will include:
1.an outline of this talk including screen-caps
2.a simplified document with basic HTML instructions helping the non-web designer through some simple things that will give you greater control over the look of your content body displays

BOTH ARE DOWNLOADABLE PDFS UNDER "ATTACHMENTS" BELOW
I am sharing these documents under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 2.5 General License. It took a lot of work for me to put this together :) I hope you can make good use of it, but if you do, I would appreciate it if you credit me for my effort. Thank you.

HOW TO FIND ME:

Rain Breaw
Twitter: @sunrainprods
Website: www.sunrainproductions.com