The Drupal Default Adminstrative Tool Bar (A short break from JS)
I recently set up a Drupal site for somebody new to Drupal to begin to learn and experiment with. I want to give him a place to begin to grasp the limitless possibilities that Drupal represents. Those of us who have ridden the Drupal roller coaster know there is a lot to learn for a first time Drupal user. There are also many approaches to beginning to learn Drupal. The Drupal.org documentation starts with understanding Concepts the Technology stack terms etc. But most people I find want to get right in there start doing something. Given this instinct to jump in I thought a good place to begin to learn Drupal would be the thing most obvious to an administrative user who has just gone to his new site, the Drupal ToolBar.
Lets first be clear this is for a fresh Drupal plain vanilla Drupal install. No modules or themes have been added yet, and this is not a distribution. Things can be significantly different, depending on distribution and module selection. On a Drupal installation this will appear as a bar on the top of the page. To make sure it is big enough to see I broke the screen shot of the toolbar into 3 parts Lets start with an image of the left part of the menu.
On the far left on the top part of the menu you can see an icon that looks like a house. This icon will return you to the home page from where ever you are.
The next selection is the Dashboard. I will be honest and say that I don't use this much but by default it will show you who is on line and provide a search box. You can choose to add a few other things to the page as well. As I said for me it isn't that useful, but somebody must like it so it's there.
The next selection, Content is someplace you will be a lot. This will list the content of your site. From here you can select some particular content to edit or delete. There is also a link to add content and some tools to do filters and some mass updates for content you select.
The Structure selection allows you to do things like manage what is to appear in different regions of your site, add and edit menus, manage classification of content. While all of the options here are important the one that lets you manage create and edit content types to me is the one that is indispensable.
Appearance lets you enable, disable and edit the settings of your sites themes. Themes are what control the look and feel of your site. One theme you may want to enable and set as default for a short time would be Stark. I say for a short time because this theme is naked Drupal without any theming at all. It is what Drupal wants to do. The reason you want to see this is to understand the default Drupal layout. You can make Drupal look almost anyway you want but the further from Start that you go the more work you will have to do.
People is the selection to manage users there are two tabs, List, and Permissions. The list tab lists the users in your site this is where you can go to manage them. It also has a link to create a new users. The permissions tab allows you to set the permissions for the various roles in your site. The permissions tab also has a link to create new roles
In Drupal modules allow you to extend and expand the functionality of your site. The Modules selection is where you enable, disable, and uninstall your modules.
The configuration page has link to various global system and module configuration pages. There are places to enter a site slogan, change the sites title, configure global options for the users and more.
The reports section is just that. It provides various system reports. As beginners the two that you will find the most useful is the Status and the Available Updates reports
Help is full of documentation on various tasks including the official documentation of what I am discussing in this article, which is just an overview.
On the right side you have hello and then the logged in user name, in this illustration I have blacked that out. If the hello username is clicked you will be taken to your user information page. The logout is self explanatory
At the end is a little triangle. This triangle expands and collapses a shortcut bar, in the graphic it is expanded (note the grey area and the triangle pointing down. On the screen shot of the left side of the menu you can see the two shortcuts provided by default, Add content and Find content. The Edit short cut links on the right side allows to remove or add additional links.
This toolbar is enable on a new site by default. There are however alternative administrative toolsbars available like the Admin Menu Module. If you down load and use one of these the layout may be slightly different Also when using an alternative to Drupal Toolbar be sure to disable the toolbar on the modules page.
