Creating a new page

Submitted by pwadmin on

To create a page:

  1. Click Add content in the Navigation menu at the side. Or, click Content in the black bar at the top, and click the Add content link at the top-left of the page that pops up.
  2. Drupal will present you with a list of content types to choose from. Click the name of the type of content you wish to create.Most of the time you will want to choose Basic page, but, depending on your needs, you may have other types available to you.
  3. Once you've chosen the type of content to create, you will be presented with a form for entering your new page's information. WARNING: your web page will break if you try to paste text directly from Word. For more detail, please read the body editor and content form in depth help sections.
    1. The most important fields are the Title field (which will be the title of your new page) and the Body area (which will be the main text of the page).
    2. Certain content types will have other fields. For example, an Event will need you to fill in a date, while a Photo album will need you to upload some pictures.
    3. You must fill in fields that are marked with a red *. You won't be able to save if you don't fill them in!
  4. Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click the Save button

Background information

Content types

Drupal lets you define different types of content, which can be used to store different types of information. Here are some examples of different types of content:

  • Many pages on a website, such as an About us page, are very simple — just a title and some text. Content like this are Basic pages.
  • A page talking about an Event that you are hosting will have, at minimum, the date that the event will occur on.
  • A store might have Product content that contains a price, a picture, and so forth.

Note that, if you wanted to, you could talk about an Event or Product by making a Basic page and just stating the extra information in the page text. Your readers will understand what you mean but a computer is not smart enough to be able to tell the difference between an Event made this way and, say, your About us page.

The main advantages of using separate content types are:

  • they give the computer hints about what a page talks about (so it can do cool things like automatically filling in a calendar, or calculating how much tax to add to a product when you buy it),
  • it lets you enforce that certain information must be filled in before the content can be created (for example, an event must have a date),
  • it makes things less confusing to new users by hiding things that aren't relevant to them.

It's easy for us to create new content types. If you request it, we can flip some switches so you can do it too, but we usually leave it hidden because the way to add new content types is confusing for new users.