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Beginning Drupal 8

Todd Tomlinson - Beginning Drupal 8 (The Expert's Voice in Drupal) - 2015

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Chapter 1 ■ Introduction to <strong>Drupal</strong><br />

• Pathauto: Creates search engine–friendly URLs by automatically generating a<br />

“pretty” URL that is based on the page’s title (such as www.example.com/examples<br />

instead of the default <strong>Drupal</strong> URL of www.example.com?node=1234).<br />

• Scheduler: Provides the ability to specify the date that a node will become published<br />

on the site, and the date when a node will no longer be published. This allows a<br />

content author to create a node now and have it not appear on the site until some<br />

date in the future.<br />

<strong>Drupal</strong> Themes<br />

A theme is the <strong>Drupal</strong> component that defines how the pages on your website are structured and the visual<br />

aspects of those pages. A <strong>Drupal</strong> theme defines attributes of your website such as:<br />

• How many columns of information will be presented on a page (a three-column<br />

layout with a left, center, and right column; a two-column layout with a narrow left<br />

column and a wide right column for content; a one-column layout, and the like).<br />

• Whether a page has a banner at the top.<br />

• Whether a page has a footer.<br />

• Where navigational menus appear (at the top of the page, under the banner, in the<br />

right column, and so on).<br />

• The colors used on the page.<br />

• The font and font size used for various elements on a page (such as headings, titles,<br />

and body text).<br />

• Graphical elements, such as logos.<br />

<strong>Drupal</strong> core includes a number of off-the-shelf themes that you can use for your new website. You<br />

may also download one or more of the hundreds of free themes that are available at www.drupal.org/<br />

project/project_theme, or create your own theme by following the directions found at www.drupal.org/<br />

documentation/theme.<br />

Creating Content<br />

A website without content would be like a book without words, a newspaper without news, and a magazine<br />

without articles: hardly worth the effort of looking at. <strong>Drupal</strong> makes it easy to create, publish, and manage<br />

content on your new website. Let’s look at how simple it is by creating our first piece of content. If you<br />

haven’t installed <strong>Drupal</strong> yet, please visit the Appendix and follow the step-by-step process for installing and<br />

configuring <strong>Drupal</strong> core.<br />

There are multiple paths for getting to the content-authoring screens in <strong>Drupal</strong>. I’ll focus on the<br />

simplest first, and then discuss other methods in Chapter 2.<br />

On the front page of your new website, you will see an “Add content” link beneath the no front page<br />

content has been created yet message on your home page. In the left-hand column, you will also see an “Add<br />

content” link in the Tools menu (see Figure 1-1). Click either of the links: they both take you to the content<br />

editing form where you will create your first piece of content.<br />

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