Starting a site under NCCommunities
These instructions are for members of NCCommunities who want their own Drupal and, optionally, CiviCRM site operating under the nccommunities.org software installation. Your site will inherit the modules and some of the configuration of nccommunities.org. These instructions will help you get started.
General information
- Feedback: Please provide feedback. Use the Forums or Comments to ask questions or make suggestions. Feel free to edit pages to correct errors or add to and improve instructions.
- Glossary: If you aren't sure what a word means, check the Glossary.
- Recommended browser: This site works best with the Mozilla Firefox and Safari (for Windows as well as Macs) browsers. Opera and Flock also work OK. You may encounter problems if you use Internet Explorer.
- What the Administrator sees: As Administrator, you will see more options than your users will see.
- Navigation: admin/build/modules means go to http://yoursite/admin/build/modules
- Finding special pages: In Drupal handbooks, when you see "view the xxxx page," go to http://yoursite/xxxx . Examples: http://nccommunities.org/profile, http://nccommunities.org/aggregator.
- Read the instructions: Drupal pages are self-documenting. As you configure your site and move from page to page, read the information at the top of each page which describes the purpose of the page and how it works. For more complete instructions, see the README.txt file, and sometimes INSTALL.txt, in the directory for the module, for example, http://nccommunities.org/sites/all/modules/og/README.txt.
- You can change things later: If you aren't sure how to configure something, just leave it as it is. You can always go back later and change things.
- Save your changes: When you change something, be sure to go to the bottom of the page and save your changes.
- Menus and left sidebar: The menu and the left sidebar will change as you configure your site. You probably don't want to rearrange menu items until you have most of the modules you want to use enabled.
- Keep notes: I have a folder for each site on my PC and keep notes as I make changes. I also have an email folder for each sites.
Step-by-step instructions
- Site name: You may either register a domain name (like mysite.org) or use a subdomain of nccommunities.org (like mysite.ncccommunities.org). If you want to use your own domain, go ahead and register the name. We recommend registering your domain through Register.com using http://www.deltaforcedomains.com.
- Register with NCCommunities.org and Become an NCCommunities member: The membership application is not available yet. Meanwhile send email to drupal@rtpnet.org In the application form, specify your domain name or the subdomain you would like. You will be notified of your database name, username, and password and when your site is ready to use.
When your site is ready to use, your home page will contain something like:
Welcome to your new Drupal website!
This message will disappear once you have published your first post.
- Create your administrator account: Create the first account. This account will have full administration rights and will allow you to configure your website. I use "admin" as this username.
I think I need to do this so that I can run update.php after updating Drupal. So we'll want to create an administrator role for other administrators.
- Run cron: Go to yoursite/cron.php. You'll get a blank page. Click your browser's back arrow.
- Configure User Management: Go to admin/user
- Click User settings. Determine how new accounts are created and what you want to tell new users when they register.
- Check Visitors can create accounts but administrator approval is required.
- Put policy and acceptance agreement info in User registration guidelines.
- Change the email "Welcome" message to reflect your guidelines. For example, "You will not be able to login until the site administrator approves your registration. You will be notified by email when your registration has been approved. By registering, ..."
- If you want to allow users to have a picture, check Enabled for Picture Support.
- Click Save configuration.
- Go back to User Management. You can click User management in the breadcrumb near the top of the page or in the left sidebar or go directly to admin/user.
- Click Access control to see what the table looks like. There are two roles defined, anonymous user and authenticated user. This is where you can give special groups, like "Staff" and "Webmasters" special privileges. We'll come back to this page often. Go back to User Management.
- Click Roles. If you know what roles you want, you can create them now. It is often recommended to have an "administrator" role. To create a role, enter a name in the text box, for example administrator and then click Add role.
- Profiles: Here you define the fields for information you wish to collect in user profiles. For example, click
- Users: If approval is required for your users, you'll come here to approve them. Click Users and you'll see a list of all the usernames on your site. To activate an account, you'll check the box for the user, in the dropdown menu, select Unblock the selected users, and then click Update.
- Site Configuration: Go to /admin/settings
- Click Clean URLs. Click to run the test and then select Enabled and click Save configuration. Drupal usually creates URLs that have ?q= in them. This can make URLs hard to read and it also stops many search engines, like Google, from indexing the pages with these URLs. Enabling Clean URLs gets rid of the ?q= . Reference: Clean URLs.
- Click Date and time. Set Default time zone to your current time. Click Save configuration.
- Click File system. Under File system path, change files to sites/yourdomain/files. Click Save configuration.
- Click Input formats. For Filtered HTML, click configure. At the top of the page, click the Configure tab. In the text box Allowed HTML tags, I added:
<b> <i> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <hr> <p> <font>
Click Save configuration.
- Click Site information. Here you can change the email address of the site administrator. You can enter the Name of your site, Slogan, Mission, and Footer. The theme determines which of these items are displayed and where. You can include HTML formatting. For example, the footer for nccommunities.org is: "<b>A service of Public Information Network, Inc.</b>". For Default front page, I changed "node" to "frontpage" and then when I created the content for the page I gave it an alias of "frontpage". (Step 8 below.)
- Under Performance, I have Caching mode Disabled. (When I tried enabling cache support, we got blank screens. It wasn't easy to turn it back off. But that was with a much earlier version of Drupal. In any case, I don't think our sites need caching.)
- Check enabled core modules: Go to admin/build/modules. Scroll down the page to get an idea of what modules are available to you. There are some "contributed" modules at the top of the page and a bunch more at the bottom of the page. In the middle are the "core" modules. None of the contributed modules are enabled. You can enable or disable modules as you wish. The module descriptions are quite good and describe any interdependencies. Installation description also gives a brief description of each core module and each contributed module on NCCommunities, with a link to more information. NOTE: If you enable statistics, then admin/logs gives access to referrers, top pages, top users, and recent hits. Most NCCommunities sites have the following modules enabled: Front Page, Book, Color, Comment, Contact, Forum, Help, Menu, Path, Profile, Search, Statistics, Taxonomy, Tracker, Upload, Basic event, Event, Event All Day, Event Views, Notify, Diff, Feedback, Node Publishing Options, Quote, Recent changes, TinyMCE, Update status, System info, Views, Views Bonus Pack, and Views RSS.
- Access control: Go to admin/user/access. You will want to spend some time on this page determining who can do what. If you created an "administrator role," you'll want to give the administrator role permission to do everything. Whenever you change permission settings, be sure to go to the bottom of the page and click Save permissions. For a private site, don't check anything for role Anonymous. For authenticated users, don't check any of the "administer" boxes. You may want to check create and edit own for events, bookpages, forum topics, access comments, post comments, post comments without approval, access content (node module), search content, access tinymce, and probably several more.
- Create front page: We will create one page that is both the front page and the home page. In the left sidebar, click Create content. Click Page. Provide a Title and some text in the Body. Don't worry about formatting. You can do that later. Click URL path settings (if you don't see it, you probably don't have the Path module enabled). The first content you create will be at node/1, but you can provide an alternative URL. I use "frontpage." Click Preview. When the page looks OK, click Submit. Note: If you create a page and forget to give it an alternative URL, you can edit the page and add (or change) the URL.
- Create another user for testing. Mine is "hallman." I do "admin" work using Firefox and "hallman" work using Flock. To create a user, I log out (bottom of the left sidebar), and click Create new account. This way I see the account creation process the same way a new user will. You'll need a different email address for each username. To unblock a new account, go to admin/user/user, check the box next to the username, select Unblock the selected users in the dropdown box, and click Update. If you prefer, you can create new accounts from this page, admin/user/user — click the Add user tab at the top of the page. From this page you also assign users to roles.
- Themes: Go to admin/build/themes. Scroll down the page and notice that "garland" is "enabled" and selected as "default" and none of the other themes are enabled. Enable "pushbutton," select it as "default," and click Save configuration. You now see your site displayed with an entirely different theme. To change the default back to garland, simple select default next to garland. If you want, you can enable multiple themes and allow users to change the theme they use from their "My account" page.
- Logo: On admin/build/themes, use the configuration tab, to make global changes, such as specifying a logo. For example, to get rid of the Drupal droplet, uncheck "Use the default logo." To get rid of it in the browser's address bar, uncheck "Use default shortcut icon." You can also configure specific themes.
- My account: In the left sidebar, above the "Administer" section, click My account. There's some basic information about "My account" in "How To" basics. If you have more than one theme enabled, you'll see the choices on this page. While you're on this page, you might want to provide a signature, perhaps something like "yoursite.nccommunities.org system administrator."
- Run cron: Go to yourdomain/cron.php. A blank page will be displayed. Once a day or so, go to yourdomain/cron.php to run cron, which will update information such as search indexes and news feeds. Use your browser's Back button to go back to your Web site page. When you have your site established, ask drupal@rtpnet.org to automate running cron for your site.
- Configure TinyMCE: TinyMCE (rich-text editing) is a "What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get" (WYSIWYG) editor. Go to admin ("Administer"). Click the tab By module. Under TinyMCE, click TinyMCE. You should see "No profiles found. Click here to create a new profile." Click create a new profile. Click Basic setup. I used: "Profile name:" tinymce profile, "Roles allowed to use this profile:" Allow (checked) administrator and authenticated user, "Default state:" from the dropdown menu select "enabled," "Allow users to choose default:" from the dropdown menu select "true," "Show disable/enable rich text editor toggle:" from the dropdown menu select "true," "Language:" select "en," "Safari browser warning:" select "false." You can click the other headings to see the options available. I used the defaults. Click Create profile. You should see the message, "Your TinyMCE profile has been created." I have TinyMCE enabled by default, but disabled for users admin and hallman. See My account and see TinyMCE for more information.
- Go to your home page. Click the Edit tab. You should be able to format your home page as you want it now.
- Menus: Go to Administer, menus (admin/build/menu). You can enable/disable the appearance of items in the menu and you can move them up and down using weights. Items with lower weight float to the top, while heavier items sink. Primary links will be displayed on the top right of each page, if you are using the Garland theme. For the path in primary links, I did not include a leading slash, just the URL (for example, "policies".)
Under Primary links, cleck Add item. Title: Log out, no description, Path logout. "Log out" now displays in the top right of each page. Add item Home, description Home page, path frontpage.
Notice "directory" in the left sidebar. Scroll down and to the right of "directory," click disable.
Enabling a new module may add new items to the menu.
- Blocks: Go to Administer, blocks (admin/build/block). There's a lot more menu-type stuff here. Again, you can enable/disable and move items up and down using weights. When you enable a new module, look here for new content as well as on the menu. Notice that "Calendar to browse events" is Disabled. In its dropdown menu under None, select left sidebar and click Save blocks. To move the calendar to the bottom of the left sidebar, in the Weight dropdown menu, select 9 and click Save blocks.
To activate a disabled item, in the dropdown menu, select a region where you want to place the item. To disable an item, select the region "none."
- Content types: Click Create content in the left sidebar. You'll see a list of the content types that you can create. As an authenticated user check the content types. If you have not given permission for authenticated users to create a content type, it isn't listed. Go to admin/content/types. You'll see the same list, but with an Edit option. For Book page, click Edit. You can change the name to "Resource item" or something else and you can change the description. Under Default options notice:
- Promoted to front page: Think about what you want to have on your front page. If "Promoted to front page" is checked, when new content of this type is created, a teaser for it will be added to the front page. Each content type has "Promoted to front page" as an option.
- Create new revision: If you are building documentation, instruction manuals, or the like, you might want to create a new revision each time a piece of it changes. You can view differences between revisions and revert back to a previous version. I have it turned on for book pages. When I make minor edits, like correcting typos, I try to remember to uncheck it so that it doesn't create another revision with trivial changes.
Go ahead and edit your content types now. Be aware that adding new modules can sometimes create new content types, and they will default to "Promoted to front page" unless you go in and edit them.
- News aggregator: Go to Administer, By module (admin/by-module). Click News aggregator. Click Add category and add your categories. Mine are "Web seminars" and "Blogs." Click Add feed. To find the URL for a feed, go to its home page, look for RSS (usually an orange icon) or XML (often near the bottom of the page or it can be at the end of the address bar), click it, copy the URL, paste in the URL, give the feed a title, select a category, and click Submit. Reference: Drupal Handbook: Aggregator.
- This section needs updating Image and Inline: NOTE: Photos for account profiles are independent of image modules. If you want people to be able to upload images: