Adding and Editing Content
Drupal makes it easy to add and edit content on your website. In this tutorial we'll cover the fundamentals of how to add basic pages and articles, and how to go back later and edit them. We'll conclude by reviewing Drupal's built-in tools for finding content, which comes in pretty handy, particularly in larger websites.
Drupal's admin gives us two easy ways to link to the add content form.
- We can use the shortcut "Add Content," or...
- We can go to, content, and then click on the 'Add Content' link.
We see, we have two options for types of content we want to add. An article, which is good for press releases and blog posts and more news type things, and a basic page, which is just a good basic type for any generic page on your website.
Adding a Basic Page
Creating the Page
To start, we're just going to go ahead and do the basic page. We just click on 'Basic Page', and we see that we need to add two pieces of content, a title and a body. Let's add a title. We'll make this an "About Us" page, and I'm just going to go ahead and paste in some text here. Scroll down and we'll click Save. We'll go over what these settings are in a moment, but for now I just want to click Save. And we see that we've created our first custom text generated page. This page is a node, and what we see is that the body is down here in the main part of our page, our title is here, but it's also up here as the meta title of the page. The one last thing we want to look at is the URL to get to this node. And it's just labeled, the word node, followed by the node I.D. Since this is the first node we created, it's one. Now to edit this page, we simply can go to this tab and click Edit. Of course, we have backer content fields of title and body. This is what allows us to change that text whenever we need to. But let's scroll down to some of the more advanced settings.
Text Format
The first one you're going to notice is this, text format, drop-down. It gives us access to various different types of filters that we can apply in our body. You'll also see this applied in various different other places in Drupal. What this is really about is, there are times where we might want to filter out certain types of things from being displayed in our text. So, for example, you might have user-generated content where authors can put pretty much whatever they want into their body field of their node. So, for example, they might want to put in spammy hyperlinks, which does happen on user-generated content sites. With a filtered HTML, we will make it so those things get filtered out when it displays.
The next things you'll notice are these vertical tabs, which gives us access to even more settings.
Menu Settings
The first one is the menu settings, which we activate by clicking on this check box. Now when we get our series of fields, that allows us to easily add a menu item, which just provides a link so that people can quickly get to this node.
Revision Information
This next tab is a revision information. And Drupal does allow you to create revisions of your nodes, so that if you ever need to, you can go back to older versions.
URL Path Settings
Our next tab is the URL path settings. And if you remember, I pointed out that the URL to get to our node is, node, slash, the node I.D, or node one for this particular one. The URL path settings allows us to put something that's a little bit more friendly. Pretty much whatever we want that's saying it's more human-readable.
Comment Settings
Our next setting is Comment Settings. Drupal is a social platform, and commenting is built into core. Now on many pages this doesn't make sense to have comments, so we keep them closed. But if you did have a blog post or an article, you might want to allow users to do commenting and this is where you can turn it on for a particular node.
Authoring Information
Next, we have our authoring information. It's really just two pieces of information: who owns this content, and when was it authored on. And if you want, you can go ahead and delete this and it will just give you whatever the current date is of when you post. Another neat little trick is, if you ever want to post anything in the future, you can put a future date in that box, and it won't display until that time.
Publish Options
Our last settings are our publish options. Published is the one you're going to work with the most. Basically, is this node published to the public or not. A lot of times you might want to save a draft of something, so you can leave this unchecked, then you can work with it, maybe send it to an editor. And then when you want it to display in your website, you just click, published. And then it's up to go. It's good to go again. So, we're going to go ahead and click Save.
Adding a Press Release
Let's look at creating another type of node. We do that by going to 'Add Content,' and this time I'm going to click the article type. We'll see there's a few different fields because we are dealing with a different type of content. Here, we're going to put in a press release.
- So, we're going to put in a title.
- Now we'll see that we have these tags. Tags are really just a way of organizing content by using different types of terms; I'm just going to free type in a few things here: sales, growth, and widgets.
- Now, I want to go ahead and paste in a body.
- And as we scroll down, we see that we also get to this additional image field. So, I'm going to go ahead and browse and select an image that I want to use. And I can click this, Upload, and it gives me a nice view of what this image might look like, and I can put in some alt text (sold sign).
- Then we go ahead and scroll down and click Save.
Now we've added an article node. Let's take a look at it. We'll see there's actually a lot of similarities between our basic page, but there are some differences. So, for example, our title's up here, our body is down here, but in between, we now have this accent image. And if we scroll down, we'll also see that there's these different tags that help us organize our content. What's going on is that Drupal allows you to have different types of nodes. We're going to look deeper into this in our Introduction to Content Types.
Finding & Updating Content
So now we've seen how to add nodes to our website, and how to edit them by using this Edit tab. But the question is, if you have a large website, how do you find all this content? Well, Drupal gives you a tool for doing that also. Simply click on 'Find Content,' or you can use the content link up in the toolbar. So we see here are our two nodes we've already added to our website. And all the nodes that you add to your site will show up in this window. Now, if you have a lot, it will paginate them and break them up so it's a little easier to work with them. One other thing that's nice about this page is it allows us to do bulk updates. So let's say, for example, we wanted to unpublish a group of nodes. We don't want to go to every one of those pages and click the Edit tab. Instead, we could just check them off here and then go to Unpublish and Update. Now we'll see that it's unpublished both of our nodes. I'm going to go back and republish them again. And now they're republished.
The other tool that's nice is it allows us to filter content. Now a nice hint is that a lot of times you're going to find content using a search box in Drupal, but a lot of times, using these filters helps you get to things quicker. So if we wanted to go ahead and look at any of these pages, we simply click on this link. If we wanted to edit or delete, we use these links over here. So, for example, if I wanted to go back to our About Us, page, I click here, and now I can edit and review, and do what I need to.
Summary
In this tutorial, we did a quick run-through of how to add, edit, and find content using Drupal's two built-in content types. Article, and basic page. We also took a quick look at some of the options for nodes. These are just the standard options that are built-in to core, and as you add modules to your site, you'll likely gain new ones. In later videos, we'll dig deeper into the specifics of what some of these options do.