...for the beginning or even completely non-technical administrator of a Drupal site

Welcome to Drupalace.com's beginner-friendly online instructions for building, maintaining, and doing great things with a Drupal web site!

I'm naming these instructions the Easy Drupal Admin Manual, or EDAM. Like the cheese: appealingly mild, and suitable for the gourmand and the first-time cheese-eater alike. (With a slightly nutty taste, say some.) All without the red wax coating.

The name is also a friendly nod to the Dutch origins of Drupal itself.

Who is this for?

These instructions are not aimed at the typical Drupal developer or tinkerer who might normally peruse this site and similar online Drupal resources. They're instructions I originally wrote and posted elsewhere for personal clients – primarily non-technical ones at that. As such, they're a slighly oddball sort of Drupal manual.

Early pages assume no knowledge whatsoever of what a content management system, open source, or Drupal are. Overall, the manual will be very basic for even a moderately technical user. It's my attempt to make site admin possible for a client who may be completely new to site management and related topics like file uploads, browser-based text editors, etc.

(In hindsight, I was a wee optimistic that completely non-technical clients, even with good, hand-holding documentation, could smoothly take over a Drupal site, but that's another story. For now, I'd like to make the pages public as they are.)

Target readers

• My non-technical clients for a Drupal site
• Your non-technical clients for a Drupal site
• Any Drupal beginner who's installed Drupal, but wonders where to go from there
• Any Drupal user with some experience, who can still appreciate a beginner-oriented guide to some steps
• An IT manager with technical chops, but who's suddenly been handed control of some site made with this Droopa-whatever thing he's never heard of
• Anyone looking for ways to explain some Drupal admin process to a beginner admin

Caveats! (That means "Beware!")

I'm relocating these pages to this site, where I hope more Drupal users – client or not! – will find something useful within. But a few warnings are in order.

First, the instructions are geared only to Drupal 5.x.

Second, most of the pages were written around the beginning of 2007. That doesn't mean much in terms of the Drupal content, but the text reflects practices of mine that were even more primitive then than now. As one example, there's a heavy emphasis on forming links and node lists based on taxonomy ID numbers, as I was not then hep to the slicker method of using Views.

Third, the text was written specifically for clients, not for generic unknown users, and strongly reflects the ways I personally like to set up and explain sites. That may or may not be good for your purposes. Likewise, it contains nothing about installing Drupal; again, it's for clients, who wouldn't be concerned with that task.

Fourth, I cheerfully taken some non-standard liberties with terminologies where I've found the usual Drupal way to be confusing. (I'll try to clean my idiosyncracies up a bit where they may be too odd for the casual visitor; let me know if something doesn't make sense.)

Finally, this manual is wildly incomplete, and is very much a work in progress. It'll keep changing as I find better ways to do things; as viewers report problems, solutions, and discoveries; and as Drupal itself keeps improving.

With the above in mind, I don't know whether this manual is appropriate for inclusion in a more public forum (like drupal.org). For now, I'll keep the goods here, see what the reaction is, and make appropriate improvements.

Thank you!

Your feedback is wildly appreciated!