Drupal User Guide: Additional
CMS Website Core Module Usage and Management
A guide to drupal written by illuminateICT.
Follow this guide, using the menu on the left (and page list below), to learn how to add the following to your website: discussion forums, online newsletters and events.
Stories
In the introductory documentation you looked at how to create and edit pages of content for your website. In an almost identical way to creating a new page, you can create a news story for your site: on the 'create content' pane of the control panel, click 'story'.
The subtle difference between a story and a page is really only how you expect it to be accessed and interpreted by a visitor of your site: when you create a story – as opposed to a page – the story will by default be promoted to the special news page of your site, with the most recent news article appearing at the top of that page; whereas a page will usually be linked to from a menu on your site and will not be related to a specific date or time (e.g. contact information, services that are offered, members of staff or volunteers, etc.).
To see how news stories can be presented on your site, create two or more different stories and then click on the 'News' item in the main menu.
Currently your site has a 'home' page set as the default website front page (the first page that a visitor will see) and the news page is accessed using the 'News' menu item, but if you decide you would like the site to be a very news-oriented site, then you may want to set the front page of your site to be the main news page (a page called 'node'). The process of changing the main page of your site is described in the advanced website management document.
Creating and Using On-line Discussion Forums
Follow through the topics below:
- Creating On-line Discussion Forums
- Creating Forums
- Forum Containers
- Using On-line Discussion Forums
- Posting a topic
- Posting a reply
Creating Forums
A discussion forum allows users and visitors of your website to hold on-line discussions and is a great way to add vitality to, and therefore maintain visitors' interest in, your website.
First of all you need to create some forums. You'll need at least one forum if you'd like users to be able to hold on-line discussions, and you will probably want more than one forum to help better organise particular discussions into their relevant forums.
To create some forums you need to log in as webadmin and then open up the 'administer' pane on the the control panel, then click on the 'forums' icon.
On the forums administration page, you'll notice that there are currently no forums on your website. To create your first forum, click on the 'add forum' tab. Now a page will load, prompting you to describe your new forum. Enter a name and description for your forum and then, as in the previous scenarios, click the 'submit' button to finalise your changes. Now, you can see your forum has been created. Repeat the previous steps to create another forum. Now you can see all of your new forums.
Forum Containers
As described before, a forum is a container of potentially many discussions that are somehow related to one another (e.g. discussions about food, travel, pets, problems, etc.). In the same way that a forum can contain discussions, a container can contain related forums. You can add forum containers in the same way that you add forums only you need to click 'add container' on the forum management page. Usually you will only want to use forum containers if you intend to have a very large set of forums. The beauty of the Drupal system is that, like menus, forums and containers can be effortlessly reorganised at a later stage.
Posting a topic
Now that you have created some forums as the webadmin user, log out as that user and then log in as a basic user to see how they can use the forum. To access the forums that you created, locate the forums item on your site's main menu and click it.
Now, on the forums screen, click on the title of the forum that you would like to start a discussion on.
Notice that there are currently no discussions in the forum; it's not very interesting yet, but it will be when lots of people start to post topics and replies to topics. The options here are quite self explanatory – if you are ever unsure of what something does, it's usually quite safe to click it and see: 'my discussions' will list discussions in the forum that you have been engaged in, to help you to quickly find them; 'active discussions' will list the most active discussions in the forum; and 'post new forum topic' will allow you to do just that. Click on 'post new forum topic' to create your first topic in this forum.
This screen should now look familiar – it's very similar to the screen for editing a website page. Enter a short descriptive subject for the topic you are posting, then fill out the body text – and pictures if you like, and then click the 'submit' button to save you new discussion topic into the forum.
Now, you can see that your topic has been added to the discussion.
Posting a reply
Now that you have created a topic on a forum, to demonstrate how replies may be made, log out as the basic user and log in as a user with the editor role.
Navigate back to the forums screen, by clicking on the forums item of the main menu, and then click on the forum with the recent posting made by the basic user. On the topic screen, click 'add new comment' to post a reply. Note that, as a privileged editor user, you could edit or delete the original post if appropriate.
Managing and Using On-line Newsletters
A newsletter may be considered to be special website page that, after you have finished editing it (e.g adding pictures and text), it can be emailed to a list of subscribers to that particular newsletter – usually newsletter subscribers are members of your website, but this is not necessarily so. By default your website will have at least one newsletter that people can subscribe to, but, if appropriate, you can create as many different newsletters as you like. An easy way to have members subscribe to a newsletter is to add that particular newsletter's block to your website, then they may simply click on the 'subscribe button'.
This screen gives you some options for managing your newsletters. The tabs along the top, reading 'Sent items', 'drafts', 'newsletters', 'subscriptions', respectively allow you to view sent newsletter articles, view in-progress newsletter articles that have not yet been sent, manage your newsletters (e.g. create new newsletters or edit existing ones), and manage subscriptions to your newsletters. Let's take a look at the 'subscriptions' administration page by clicking on the 'subscriptions' tab.
The subscriptions page allows you to manage subscriptions to your news letters. Although you will probably prefer to let members of your site control their own subscription to newsletters (i.e. rather than you having to manually subscribe tens or hundreds of people), you may want to subscribe some people who are not members of your site. To do this, you can click on the 'import subscriptions' option on the subscriptions page, whereupon you will be able to manually add a list of email address.
Sending a Newsletter
The process of sending a newsletter article to its subscribers is nearly identical to that of creating pages for your website. Login to your website as an editor user, then click the 'newsletter' icon from the 'create content' area of the control panel.
Now, similarly to creating a page, write a title and content but also select the newsletter that this article belongs to.
Usually when you create something like a newsletter, you'll want to work on it probably over a few days before sending off. After writing a title and some content, scroll down the page a little and you'll see some options specific to newsletter articles.
The important option here is the sending option, that allows you to specify when the newsletter article should be sent to all of the subscribers. If you're happy with the content and want to send it now, click the 'send newsletter' option; otherwise, leave this set to 'don't send now'. To save, and possible send, the news letter, scroll to the bottom of the page and click 'submit'.
Re-editing a Draft Newsletter
If you chose not to send your newsletter article the first time you edited it, you can access it again – and any other pieces of content that you have previously contributed to - by clicking on the 'my account' icon on the control panel.
On you personal account screen, click on the 'track' tab to track the content you have edited recently.
Then click on the newsletter article to re-edit it and send it if desired.
Events
To create an event, just as you would create any other type of content, click on the 'create content' pane of the control panel, then click 'event'. Now, set the start and end times of your event and enter a title and the body of the event, then click 'submit'.
If you have the events block displayed on you site, notice how the calendar now shows the date of your event highlighted.
Click on the name of the month to begin browsing the calendar and you will see your event.
Browsing an online calendar in this way is a very nice way for members or general visitors of your site to find out what your group or organisation is up to.