Quick and Easy guide

The Quick and Easy guide

This guide provides, basic information required to navigate the website smoothly. For more in depth information please go to the "Advanced Users Manual".

Navigation

Basic navigation is by the side bar(top left hand corner, and below your user name). As a registered user, you have your own specific navigation bar. The following headings give a brief description of the some of the options available as well as their uses.

My account

To edit personal information such as email address,name, password etc, simply go to this page, and fill out the correct/new information.

Create content

This link can be use to post up things like Small Group questions, sermons, and even photos.

To use:

i)

Click the "Create Content" link

ii)

Chose the type of information you wish to publish, such as a page, forum topic

iii)

Fill out the details and then click "Preview" which is at the bottom of the page.

iv)

Click the "Submit" (which is at the bottom, next to the "Preview" option) to have the information put up on the site.

There are various types of content which can be placed on the site:

forum topic
static page

A static page is the basic page for most information submissions.

Once you have submitted your information, to check your post you can either navigate to it, or you can click on the "Recent posts" menu. Once you have reached that page, it shouldn't be too hard to find your post, as the most recent ones appear on top of the list.

Note:

You can use the "Recent Post" link to view other peoples' recent submissions also.

To Edit Content

To make changes to any post. Navigate to your post, then, if you have the right permission level, click on the 'edit' tab. Make your changes then re-submit.

Advanced Users Manual

Node module

Nodes
The core of the Drupal system is the node. All of the contents of the system are placed in nodes, or extensions of nodes.A base node contains:

A Title
Up to 128 characters of text that titles the node.
A Teaser
A small block of text that is meant to get you interested in the rest of node. Drupal will automatically pull a small amount of the body of the node to make the teaser (To configure how long the teaser will be click here). The teaser can be changed if you don't like what Drupal grabs.
The Body
The main text that comprises your content.
A Type
What kind of node is this? Blog, book, forum, comment, unextended, etc.
An Author
The author's name. It will either be "anonymous" or a valid user. You cannot set it to an arbitrary value.
Authored on
The date the node was written.
Changed
The last time this node was changed.
Static on front page
The front page is configured to show the teasers from only a few of the total nodes you have on your site (To configure how many teasers click here), but if you think a node is important enough that you want it to stay on the front page enable this.
Allow user comments
A node can have comments. These comments can be written by other users (Read-write), or only by admins (Read-only).
Attributes
A way to sort nodes.
Revisions
Drupal has a revision system so that you can "roll back" to an older version of a node if the new version is not what you want.
Promote to front page
To get people to look at the new stuff on your site you can choose to move it to the front page.
Published
When using Drupal's moderation system a node remains unpublished -- unavaliable to non-moderators -- until it is marked Published.

Now that you know what is in a node, here are some of the types of nodes available.

Node type: book page

A book is a collaborative writing effort: users can collaborate writing the pages of the book, positioning the pages in the right order, and reviewing or modifying pages previously written. So when you have some information to share or when you read a page of the book and you didn't like it, or if you think a certain page could have been written better, you can do something about it.

Page module

The page module is used to create a static page. Unlike a story, a static page is a persistent web page on your site which usually shortcuts the typical lifecycle of user generated content (i.e. submit -> moderate -> post -> comment). A static page is usually linked from the main navigation bar, using whatever text the author wishes. To create a static page without this navigation link, simply skip the link text field.

Site pages, unlike many other forms of Drupal content, may be made of PHP code in addition to HTML and text. All Drupal objects and functions are available to a site administrator.

Book module

The book organises content into a nested hierarchical structure. It is particularly good for manuals, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) and the like, allowing you to have chapters, sections, etc.

A book is simply a collection of nodes that have been linked together. These nodes are usually of type book page, but you can insert nodes of any type into a book outline. Every node in the book has a parent node which "contains" it. This is how book.module establishes its hierarchy. At any given level in the hierarchy, a book can contain many nodes. All these sibling nodes are sorted according to the weight that you give them.

A book page is a special node type that allows you to embed PHP within the body of the page. This capability is only offerred to administrators, since malicious users could abuse this power. In addition, book pages contain a log message field which helps your users understand the motivation behind an edit of a book page. Each edited version of a book page is stored as a new revision of a node. This capability makes it easy to revert to an old version of a page, should that be desirable.

Like other node types, book submissions and edits may be subject to moderation, depending on your configuration. Similarly, books use permissions to determine who may read and write to them. Only administrators are allowed to create new books, which are really just nodes whose parent is 'root'. To include an existing node in your book, click on the "administer"-link in that node. At the bottom of this administration page, click on the edit book outline button. This enables you to place the node wherever you'd like within the book hierarchy. To add a new node into your book, use the submit content » book page link.

Whenever you come across a post which you want to include in a book click on the administer link. Then click on the edit book outline button at the bottom of the page. Then place the relevant post wherever is most appropriate in your book by selecting a parent. Books are quite flexible. They can have sections like Flying to Estonia, Eating in Estonia and so on. As you get more experienced with the book module, you can reorganize posts in your book so that it stays organized.

Notes:

* Any comments attached to those relevant posts which you designate as book pages will also be transported into your book. This is a great feature, since much wisdom is shared via comments. Remember that all future comments and edits will automatically be reflected in your book.
* You may wish to edit the title of posts when adding them to your FAQ. This is done on the same page as the Edit book outline button. Clear titles improve navigability enormously.
* Book pages may come from any content type (blog, story, page, etc.). If you are creating a post solely for inclusion in your book, then use the submit content » book page link.
* If you don't see the administer link, then you probably have insufficient permissions.
* If you want to get really fancy, note that books are one of the few content types which allow raw PHP in their body. So you've got lots of geeky possibilities there.

Images

Adding images into nodes

Sometimes, you want to add an image to another node like a blog entry or a story. You may do this by creating an image node in Drupal for the target image, and then referencing that image in your story, blog, etc. To enable this feature and learn the proper syntax, visit the filters configuration screen.

Search module

Search guidelines

The search page allows you to search the web site's content. You can specify multiple words, and they will all be searched for. You can also use wildcards, so 'walk*' will match 'walk', 'walking', 'walker', 'walkable' and so on. Furthermore, searches are not case sensitive so searching for 'walk', 'Walk' or 'WALK' will yield exactly the same results.
Words excluded from the search

Words that frequently occur, typically called 'noise words', are ignored. Example words are 'a', 'at', 'and', 'are', 'as', 'how', 'where', etc. Words shorter than 2 letters are also ignored.

User module

Introduction

Drupal offers a powerful access system that allows users to register, login, logout, maintain user profiles, etc. By using "roles" you can setup fine grained permission allowing each role to do only what you want them to. Each user is assigned to a role. By default there are two roles "anonymous" - a user who has not logged in, and "authorized" a user who has signed up and who has been authorized. As anonymous users, participants suffer numerous disadvantages, for example they cannot sign their names to nodes, and their moderated posts beginning at a lower score.

In contrast, those with a user account can use their own name or handle and are granted various privileges: the most important is probably the ability to moderate new submissions, to rate comments, and to fine-tune the site to their personal liking, with saved personal settings. Drupal themes make fine tuning quite a pleasure.

Registered users need to authenticate by supplying either a local username and password, or a remote username and password such as a jabber, Delphi Forums, or one from another Drupal website. See distributed authentication for more information on this innovative feature.The local username and password, hashed with Message Digest 5 (MD5), are stored in your database. When you enter a password it is also hashed with MD5 and compaired with what is in the database. If the hashes match, the username and password are correct. Once a user authenticated session is started, and until that session is over, the user won't have to re-authenticate. To keep track of the individual sessions, Drupal relies on PHP's session support. A visitor accessing your website is assigned an unique ID, the so-called session ID, which is stored in a cookie. For security's sake, the cookie does not contain personal information but acts as a key to retrieve the information stored on your server. When a visitor accesses your site, Drupal will check whether a specific session ID has been sent with the request. If this is the case, the prior saved environment is recreated.

User preferences and profiles

Each Drupal user has a profile, and a set of preferences which may be edited by clicking on the my account link. Of course, a user must be logged into reach those pages. There, users will find a page for changing their preferred time zone, language, username, e-mail address, password, theme, signature, and distributed authentication names. Changes made here take effect immediately. Also, administrators may make profile and preferences changes in administer » accounts » users on behalf of their users.