It's time to get acquainted with how to use Drupal, your new content management system. Together, we'll configure a few things. That way, you'll begin to get a feel for how Drupal works. There are quite a few things to do, but each one takes only a few seconds so you should be able to squeeze them into 20 minutes.

Drupal's "Look and Feel"

Start your favorite browser and type in the name of your web site in the address bar. For example, type "http://www.20MinuteWebBusiness.com/". (Substitute the domain name of your new web site.)

Your home page will come up.

On the left-hand side of the page, you'll find a menu. On the right-hand side, you'll sometimes find a list of choices, but more often you'll find a form to fill in. In general, the way you work with Drupal is:

• You find the menu item that lets you do what you want.
• You fill in a form to tell Drupal exactly what to do.

You'll see what we mean as you go through the next items.

Hint: Don't worry about remembering how to do each thing at this stage. You're just getting acquainted while doing a bit of useful work. You'll get comfortable with using Drupal in future 20 minute sessions when the tasks will become familiar.

Create the First Account

Depending on how you installed Drupal, you're likely to see a link on the right-hand side that says "Add your first account." If so, follow these steps to add one. (If you used SimpleScripts on BlueHost.com to install Drupal, adding the first account will already have been done for you so you can skip to changing your password.)

• Click the "Add your first account" link.
• Type in "admin" as the name.
• Type in your email address.
• Click the Submit button.

Change Your Password

Once you've set up your administrative or "first" account, you'll probably want to change the password you use to do administrative functions. There are other ways to do so, but we suggest that you follow the steps below because this method works anytime you want to change your password or any other account information. It also helps you get used to using Drupal.

• Again, type in the name of your web site in the address bar but this time, add the word "user" at the end. For example, type "http://www.20MinuteWebBusiness.com/user". (Substitute the domain name of your new web site.) This will bring up a screen where you can sign in.
• Type in the account name and password you were given when you installed Drupal. If you don't know what it is, check your email because normally Drupal sends the information to you. (If you're already logged in, you may not get a sign in screen. In that case, continue with the next step.)
• Click the "My account" link in the menu to the left.
• Click the "Edit" tab.
• Type in a new password in both the "Password" and "Confirm password" fields.
• Inspect the other fields you can change and make any other changes you wish.
• Click the Submit button.

Take the Site Offline

Next, you'll want to take your site offline. That way, if someone happens to visit it while you're making adjustments, he'll find a message that the site is undergoing maintenance. Generally, you'll want to take the site offline whenever you're making major changes to it.

• Go to Administer -> Site configuration -> Site maintenance.
• Click the Off-line item.
• Change the word "Drupal" in the Site off-line message to the name of your site, such as 20MinuteWebSite.com.
• Click the Save Configuration button.

Hint: remember to come back and put the site online again when you're done. We'll remind you to do it after you add a temporary home page in the next 20 minute task.

Tell Drupal Your Site's Name

By now, you're getting the idea of how to operate Drupal: choose a menu item, fill in a form. So let's use that method to do a few more things.

Notice that in the left-hand column, there's an option called "Administer." That's one of your key options; you'll use it many times as you build your web business. Click on it now to bring up a menu of ways you can administer your site. We'll go through a few of the options.

• In the left-hand menu, click Site configuration.
• A new menu of choices will appear beneath it. Find the Site information option and click it.
• In the Name field, enter your domain name or to whatever you're going to call the site. For example, you could use 20MinuteWebBusiness.com or just "20 Minute Web Business."
• In the E-mail address field, type "webmaster@" and your domain name. For example, type webmaster@20minutewebbusiness.com. (You may use a different email address if you prefer.)
• In the Default front page field, type "home".
• Click the Save configuration button at the bottom of the page to save your entries.

Speed Up the Site with Caching

Caching (pronounced "cashing" like "cashing a check") holds some of the unchanging information about your site in the computer's memory for a while so it can send it out more quickly than if it has to re-generate it each time someone asks for it. It's easy to turn on caching with Drupal.

• Click the left-hand menu choice for Performance.
• Under Caching mode, click the Normal button.
• Click the Save configuration button at the bottom of the page to save your entries.

Save Error Messages So You'll Have More Time to Look at Them

Sometimes there will be problems with your web site. Perhaps someone will ask for a page that's not there, for example. You'll want to check those problems and see which ones might need repair. Since your site is new, it probably won't have a lot of visitors right away which means you probably won't have a lot of errors either. You'll want to save any errors so enough of them accumulate that you can analyze them.

• Click the left-hand menu choice for Error reporting. Increase the Discard log entries older than item to "4 weeks." so you'll have longer to check on them.
• Click the Save configuration button at the bottom of the page to save your entries.

Allow Clean URL's

By default, Drupal gives each piece of content you enter a number that you use as part of its address. Some web hosting providers allow you to change this to be a word or phrase in order to be more friendly to search engines. Drupal calls these "Clean URL's." Now you'll check whether you can use such words. If you can, you'll tell Drupal to allow them.

• Click the left-hand menu choice for Clean URLs.
• Click the Run the clean URL test link.
• If you can use clean URL's, you'll see two radio buttons that allow you to enable or disable them. If all is okay, click the Enabled option.
• Click the Save configuration button.

Check the Status Report

Another thing to check is the status report, which tells you if Drupal thinks your configuration is complete.

• Click the Administer link again.
• If a pink bar with a message in it appears, click the "status report" link. Most likely, it will tell you to configure cron which is a program that performs an action automatically at certain times. Drupal uses the cron program to cause it to do things like send out newsletters or clean things up.
• Click on the "run cron manually" link to run cron the first time and get ride of the pink box.
• Go back to BlueHost.com or go to your other web host site and log in.
• From your control panel, scroll down until you find Cron Job. If you're using the cPanel control panel, it will be under the Advanced section. Click on the icon.
• Click on the Advanced (Unix Style) choice. You should see a screen that looks like the image below if you're using cPanel.
• Change the items in the form to look like this:
  • Change the zero (0) in the Hour box to an asterisk (*). This tells cron to run the job every hour.
  • Type the following in the Command box. (You may want to copy and paste it.)

    GET http://www.20MinuteWebBusiness.com/cron.php > /dev/null

  Be sure to change the "20MinuteWebBusiness.com" part to the name of your own web site's name.
• Click the button to Commit Changes. Then close the tab or window.
• Finally, click on the Home link at the top of your web site page and see how things look.