Preface

• Audience and Goal
• Organization
• Reporting Problems
• Conventions of the Guide
• Guiding Scenario

Audience and Goal

This guide was written mainly for people with minimal knowledge of the Drupal content management system. The topics will help them become skilled at installing, administering, site building, and/or maintaining the content of a Drupal-based website. The guide is also aimed at people who already have some experience with a current or past version of Drupal, and want to expand the range of their skills and knowledge or update them to the current version.

This guide assumes that you have already decided you want to learn and use Drupal. If you need to learn more before deciding, see Concept: Drupal as a Content Management System.

Depending on which aspects of Drupal you would like to learn, you will need some background knowledge to understand this guide: general Internet skills and knowledge are assumed, and the guide concentrates on how to use the software itself. For instance, the sections about installing Drupal on a web server assume you can obtain web hosting and figure out how to transfer files to your chosen web host. Similarly, the sections about content management assume you can log into a website and fill in a web-based form.

After reading this guide, you should be able to:

• Plan the content architecture for a Drupal-based site
• Build the site that you planned
• Manage and administer your site
• Understand documentation and blog posts on topics not covered here, to expand your knowledge and skills
• Connect with the worldwide Drupal community

Organization

This user guide contains a series of topics, each of which covers either a task (how to do something) or a concept (background knowledge, terminology, and the like). Concept topics have names starting with Concept:, while task topics have names containing verbs, like Editing Basic Site Information.

The topics are grouped into chapters in a logical order, with concepts and tasks interleaved so that concepts are presented before related tasks, and tasks build on each other. To take advantage of this, you are encouraged to read the entire guide in its presented order, possibly skipping topics that are not of interest or that present information you already know. Remember to try out the tasks on your own site as you read the guide; most people learn better by doing rather than reading.

If you prefer, you can also use the index or table of contents to jump straight to a topic that you'd like to learn about, rather than reading the entire guide. To facilitate this approach, each topic lists the prerequisite knowledge that you'd need in order to understand it, if any (with links to the topics that present that knowledge); task topics also list site prerequisites (things that you would need to have configured or created on your site in order to perform the task). Also, most topics have sections at the end where you can find related information and/or tasks for expanded understanding, to continue your learning.

You may also want to refer to the Glossary section as you read -- it gives brief definitions of most of the terminology used in the guide, with links to topics having more detailed explanations.

Reporting Problems

Goal

Report a problem with this guide, such as:

• Information that is incorrect or does not follow best practices
• Steps that do not work
• Screenshots or text that doesn't match what you see on the screen
• Unclear writing
• Places where a table or screenshot would help clarify the text
• Failure to define terminology
• Missing knowledge prerequisites or site prerequisites for a topic
• Typographical, spelling, grammar, or formatting errors
• Broken links

Steps

1. Make a note of the topic or topics that contain the problem you have found.
2. Log in to Drupal.org (you will need to create a user account if you do not already have one).
3. Visit the User Guide issues page on Drupal.org.
4. Verify that the problem you found has not already been reported in another issue:
   • If there are only a few open issues, scan the Summary column to see if any of their descriptions match the problem you found. You may also need to read some of the issues to make sure, which you can do by clicking the links in the Summary column.
   • If the open issue list is long, enter either a keyword related to the problem you found or the title of the topic where the problem occurs in the Search for box, and click Search to reduce the issue list. Then either scan the summaries or read the issues to see if they match your problem.
5. If you determine that your problem has not already been reported, click Create a new issue, and fill in the issue report as follows:

   Field name	Explanation	Example value
   Title	Short summary of the problem you found	Instructions in "Adding
   Category	Type of issue being reported	Bug report
   Version	Version of the guide you found the problem in	9.1.x-dev
   Issue summary	Details of the problem you found	In the "Adding a Content

6. Reread the Title and Issue summary you entered, and verify that the following information is included in your report:
   • A complete description of the problem you found
   • The name of the topic or topics where you found the problem
   • The language you are reading the guide in (if not English)
   • If you read the guide on a website, a link to the page or pages with the problem
7. Click Save to create the issue.
8. Check back on the issue in a few days. If one of the project maintainers has asked for clarification, respond by adding a comment to the issue.

Conventions of the Guide

Assumptions and prerequisites

This guide has the following assumptions and prerequisites:

• This guide covers the current major version of the core software.
• This guide is organized into topics; see Organization for details. Many topics include a Prerequisite knowledge section, which lists other topics whose content knowledge is needed in order to understand the topic you are reading. Some background knowledge that is not covered in the guide is also assumed; see Audience and Goal for details.
• Many task topics list Site prerequisites, which are tasks that you'll need to have completed on your site before you'll be able to do the task in the topic you are reading.
• The specifics of the site prerequisites relate to the scenario used throughout this guide of building a site for a farmers market (see Guiding Scenario for details). You can adapt the tasks to your own scenario, but you will also need to remember the changes you made when deciding if your site satisfies the site prerequisites for a task.
• For all task topics after Running the Interactive Installer, there is also an implicit prerequisite: you must have installed the latest stable version of the content management software on your site, and be logged in to a user account with sufficient permissions to do the task (such as the user account created when you installed your site, which automatically has full permissions).
• If you read all the topics in order, and perform all of the steps in the task topics as you go (staying logged in), you should have the background knowledge and site prerequisites in place for each topic as you read it.
• This guide demonstrates how to perform tasks using the administrative user interface, and wherever possible, also using the latest stable version of the Drush command-line tool (see Concept: Additional Tools). You can feel free to only use the administrative interface depending on your preference.

Text conventions

The following conventions are used in the text of this guide:

• The URL example.com means the base URL of your website. See the Navigation section below for more details on how URLs internal to your site are indicated.
• Text you should see in the user interface of your site is shown in italics, such as: Click Save configuration. This only applies to text in the user interface that comes from the software, not to text that was entered in a previous topic. For example, in a topic about editing, you might see this instruction: Click Edit in the row of the About page (Edit would be in italics, but About would not be, because the About page was created in a previous topic).
• URLs, file names, and newly-introduced terminology are also shown in italics.
• Text that you should type at a shell command line is shown in monospace type, such as:

drush cache:rebuild

• Within this guide, the word directory is always used to refer to file directories (which some people prefer to call folders).

Navigation

To do most of the task topics in this guide, you will need to navigate to one or more pages in the administrative interface of your site. You might see something like this in the instructions (this will make more sense after you have the base software installed):

In the Manage administrative menu, navigate to Structure > Taxonomy (admin/structure/taxonomy).

Navigation instructions like this assume that you have the core Toolbar module installed, and this example means that in the menu bar at the top of your site, you would need to click Manage to expose the menu choices, then click Structure, then Taxonomy, and that at the end, you would be on a page with URL http://example.com/admin/structure/taxonomy (if your site base URL is http://example.com).

Here's another example:

In the Manage administrative menu, navigate to Configuration > System > Basic site settings (admin/config/system/site-information).

In this example, after clicking on Manage and Configuration, you would need to find the System section of the page, and within that, click Basic site settings. After that, you'd end up on http://example.com/admin/config/system/site-information.

One other note: if you are using the standard administrative core Seven theme, many "Add" buttons in the administrative interface are displayed with + signs on them. For instance, on admin/content, the Add new content button appears as + Add new content. However, this is theme-dependent and is not really part of the text on the button (for instance, it would not necessarily be read by a screen reader), so in this guide, the convention is to not mention the + sign on the buttons.

Filling in forms

Many of the task topics in this guide include steps where you will fill out a web form. In most cases, a screen capture image of the form will be included, along with a table of the values you will need to enter into each form field. For example, you might see a table that starts out like this, explaining the site information form you would see if you navigated to Configuration > System > Site information (admin/config/system/site-information):

Field name	Explanation	Example value
Site details > Site name	Name of your site	Anytown Farmers Market

To use this table, find the field labeled Site name in the section that is under Site details in the form, and enter the name of your site in this field. An example site name of "Anytown Farmers Market" is suggested in the table, which relates to the scenario of building a website for a farmers market that you'll find all through this guide (see Guiding Scenario for details). Also note that on some forms, you might have to click a section title (like Site details in this example) to expand the section and find the field it contains.

Guiding Scenario

When reading this guide, it is helpful to have a website building project in mind. The following project scenario provides context and links together the examples in this guide:

You are making a website for a farmers market. The site needs to display information about the location and hours of the market, and an About page with the history of the market. It also needs to list the vendors. Vendors should be able to edit their listings (including a logo or photo), and post recipes. Site visitors should be able to browse recipes, or locate recipes using ingredients that they purchased at the market. Some visitors to your site speak another language, so the main pages and vendor pages need to be translated.

As you read through the guide and try out the tasks it describes, you may choose to follow the scenario exactly; you could also modify the tasks to suit your purposes. If you do want to follow the scenario exactly, you'll find that you need some image files, which are located in the assets directory of the .zip or .tgz file download available on the User Guide project page.