Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Drupal's main content is saved as an internal object, known to Drupal as a node.
Each piece of saved content is saved as one of these nodes.
This means pages and even blog posts are all essentially nodes.
We will need a few nodes in our database to theme around, so I will prepare some
content nodes, both page and blog types. Starting from my Administration screen, we
need to visit the Create content screen, and that's available on the left side
of a standard Drupal site, in the Navigation menu.
So there is a link, Create content, and when you click there, you are presented
three options by default: Blog entry, Page, and Story.
We will not be using Story throughout the course.
If you do not see Blog entry, then you have not enabled the Blog module and you
should do that before arriving at this screen. I will start out by creating some blog posts.
So I click Blog entry and now we need to add a Title.
So I say My first blog post. I say 'Hello World!'
'This is my first flower blog post.' Looks good.
I am going to now make sure that my published settings are set to Published.
That is correct, and now I click Save. I am going to now create a second blog post,
so I will make this quick. 'Another blog post.' 'Yay! More text.'
Published? Yes. Save.
We will do one last one. So just like the others, we make sure that
they are Published, and we click Save. So now we have a few blog posts saved.
If at any time you forget what content is actually saved into your system, you
can refer to the Content screen, which is in the Drupal Administration, and that
is actually covered in the Drupal Essential Training.
If at any time, after adding content, you forget what content is in your system,
then you can go to the Content Administration screen, and that's actually
covered in the Drupal Essential Training course, also available on Lynda.com.
So now that my blog posts are set up, we need a couple of pages that will be
critical to the site, so let's go and add those.
Going back to the Create content link, we are now going to add some Page node types.
So click Page, and just like blog posts they both require a Title, and will
probably have a Body. So I am going to add two pages.
The first will be the About Us page. This will be actually a little bit different,
because we are going to add some menu settings to these pages.
So we are going to open Menu Settings. The menu title will be about us.
We are going to leave all the other settings as they are.
In the Body, I have some text in the Exercise Files, so let's go get those.
In Exercise Files, Chap 02, there is some text, so we are going to grab the about text.
We are going to Copy All, go back to our Drupal site, and we are going to Paste
it into the Body area. Looks good. We will go down.
We are going to now also expose the URL path settings, and we are going to say
the URL for this node, for this page, is going to be about.
Then we make sure that we Publish. And this is a little bit different as Promoted
to the front page will not be enabled for pages, only blog posts. Click
Save. And now we have an About Us page.
In fact, the Menu Settings that we activated in creating this node now make an
About Us link up here in the Primary menu. We will do this one more time for our Services
page. Click Create content, click Page.
We will title this 'Services'. We will also use the Menu Settings, just like
the About Us page, and this will have a Title link of Services.
We also prepared you some text for this page in the Ch 02 folder of
your Exercise Files. So we are going to Copy, Paste. Looks good.
We will also provide a URL path setting. Services will be the URL, and we make sure
that the node page will be Published. That's good.
Save. Now the node Services page has been created.
We see up in the top right, in the Primary menu, both About Us and Services now appear.
We have created blog posts and page types. These are the standard content types that
we will need for our site. After setting up the blog posts and pages,
you should now be comfortable with the concept of a node in Drupal and the key
types, which are Pages and Blogs.