Creating and editing Page content

A Page is one of the most basic content types, and it is included in the Drupal Core (what you get in the basic package.)  To create a Page (or any other type of content), select Create Content from the navigation menu, then select Page.  If at any time a menu item or anything else, including an Edit tab, is not available to you, then you probably have been assigned a role* that does not have sufficient priviledge to accomplish that task. Contact a web admin and they will change your role.

A Create Page page is now displayed.  Enter a title;  our site automatically generates URLs based on this title.  Also, if the topic will be something that may repeat, perhaps yearly, make the year a part of the title;  for example, "MARC 2009."  If you expand Menu Settings below that, you will be able to insert a link to your page content in one of the many site menus**.

Next appears the Body of your page -- this encompasses most of what will be displayed.  A rich-text editing module *** enables many WYSIWYG features, such as font and paragraph formatting, and inserting links and images****. Clicking "Switch to plain text editor" will show the HTML markup that the editor is generating;  HTML whizes may want to tweak the code here.  Switching back to rich text will show the formatted output.  It is NOT exactly what shows up on the actual page, but it is close.  

Under "Signup settings", you can enable signing-up for this page, by default it is disabled. The default setting is for comments to be disabled;  change this under "Comment settings."  Keep in mind that any comments made by users that haven't logged in will automatically go to a moderation queue, where they need to be approved by a web admin before being published.  This is to screen spam bots from posting.

The next item of interest in this brief overview is "File attachments" -- select this for any files, such as brochures or permission slips that you want to list at the bottom of the page.

Under "Publishing options", the content will be automatically published;  a tip for removing content that you would like to keep, perhaps for later publication, is simply to untick the "published" box. Or you may want to delay publication of this material until after you polish the content. 

When you click the "Save" button at the bottom, the content will be saved and the generated URL will display in your browser's address bar. Copy this URL;  this is what you will use on other pages to link back to this page.  Edit the page where you want to link to your new page;  in the content, highlight the words, graphic or photo that you want to represent your link.  Click the "Insert/Edit Link" button in the editor & paste the URL into the popup window.  IMPORTANT:  for all links to content on our site, remove the leading "http://www.frogforce503.org" from the URL.  You will be creating a "relative" rather than an "absolute" URL.  That way, if we migrate our site to a different domain, we will not have to change every link on the site.  In the popup window, click the Target tab;  choose Same Window for all content created on our site.*****

Now you have a new Page;  you may return and edit the page, change comment and signup settings, and add photos and other rich content at any later time.  Please post any questions in the comments section, and again, editing content will be covered in future articles.

* roles and permissions will be covered in a future article

** menus will be covered in a future article

*** modules will ... yeah, you got it...

**** WYSIWYG features ...

***** more linking details ...