manual

A happy New Year to all! And what could ring in a new year more happily than updates to the Easy Drupal Admin Manual?

Okay, lots. But still, it's not a bad thing, right?

EDAM pages under Terms, Vocabularies, and Taxonomy: "Tagging" Your Content and Menus, Links, and Paths: Navigating the Site are now updated for Drupal 6, with one long-absent item, Placing Menus on Your Pages, finally online. All with a nifty new menu for navigating both EDAM and STARDOM, thanks to the Advanced Book Blocks and jQuery Menu modules. 

There's still more of EDAM to update, but things are coming along nicely. Look forward to more all-new content before long.

As always, please let me know of any corrections or improvements to be made to the content. If those pages do appear up to snuff, please send any newbie Drupal administrators to EDAM for an easy guide to simple site admin and content creation.

The Easy Drupal Admin Manual (EDAM) is a manual for a class of user that gets overlooked by most documentation: the non-technical administrator or editor who isn't setting up a Drupal site, but just wants to create content and perform simple configuration on an existing site. 

EDAM is finally getting a long-overdue updating for Drupal 6, too. So far, the changes are mostly tweaks to details of administration forms and some terminology; where simple admin and editing are concerned, the differences between Drupal 5 and 6 aren't great.

I did take the chance to clean up a spotty and repetitive few pages on using text editors and image editors, such as FCKeditor and IMCE. Those are now condensed into one page, Using Text and Image Editors. The overview there also tries to be general, rather than looking specifically at FCKeditor or TinyMCE alone; it's not possible to address in detail the infinite configurations of text editors and image editors and file browsers, and all possible versions there of, that might pop up on a Drupal site. 

The updating is still in progress, reaching only the Organizing Your Content page so far. It should all be completed soon, after which new manual pages can come on board. If that'd be useful, please say so! And if you know any newcomers to Drupal who can make use of a fairly simple end-user manual, send them to EDAM. 

How-to guide for a community site

Drupal 6 Ultimate Community Site Guide is an inexpensive (€5.5), 133-page ebook by Drupal enthusiast Dorien Herremans. It aims to help moderately new Drupal users bring community-oriented features to a site, via a book-length case study: the Drupal Fun site, where you'll find the book offered.

Drupal Fun's community features include basic member functionality (login, profiles), showcases, forums, shared AdSense, newsletter, user tags, user search, and content voting. It doesn't boast the shiny appearance of one of the fancier sites out there, so it's not surprise that the book doesn't delve into creation of awesome themes. Likewise, Drupal Fun's functionality comes mostly from commonly-used modules, with only a splash of manual code in blocks or elsewhere, not groundbreaking new features via heavy custom coding. But that simplicity makes the site valuable as a case study for users who want to enable those same community features despite still-modest Drupal skills.

Click here and read more!

On its way: An organized working of my collected notes and resources on the topic of goal achievement for Drupal-based websites - specifically, best practices related to SEO, traffic, and revenue generation. 

Let me quickly lay out the plan:

1. This Book will collect techniques and tips for achieving goals with a website, whether that means community building, revenue generation, readership increase, corruption of the innocent, whatever. All with special asides on how Drupal fits in.

2. It'll roughly follow the tried-and-tested "Plan, Do, Check" action cycle, as follows:

• Plan: Building a good site, promoting it effectively.
• Do: Achieving goals (building community, getting clicks, making money, etc.)
• Check: Monitoring results, making improvements. 

3. The Book begins from a selfish desire to organize my own mess of notes into something I can use to improve on goal achievement with my own sites. But as long as I'm doing that, I'm more than pleased to offer the same info to any and all, and benefit from your criticisms.

Don't be surprised to see a mish-mash of stuff with big, gaping holes. Things will get filled in and straightened up. And don't be surprised if my how-to info looks like a blanket list of all the stuff this site isn't doing right. Again, improving my own sites is a key goal, so that contradiction is to be expected!

4. Once a fair amount of how-to info is posted, the real fun begins for me: I'll work the techniques into a checklist, and begin applying it to a coterie of my own sites that could stand to be more successful. Naturally, I want to write about that process and its ongoing results!

5. At every step of the way, I would love to hear criticism, corrections, and suggestions from readers. Additional information is welcome, including links to useful how-to information for site builders.

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

Welcome to 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 rind.

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

Who is this for?

EDAM is not aimed at the typical Drupal site developer, but rather the non-technical end user who has only basic content management and site administration needs. Early pages assume no knowledge of concepts like content management systems, open source, or Drupal; even a moderately technical user will find it fairly basic. But EDAM helps fill a real need for beginner-friendly documentation centered on maintaining a site and managing content as an end user, as opposed to developing a new site.

Target readers for EDAM include:

• My non-technical clients for Drupal sites
• Your non-technical clients for Drupal sites
• Any Drupal beginner who's installed Drupal and 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 basics to a beginner administrator

Caveats! (That means "Beware!")

EDAM pages are originally written for Drupal 5. They're undergoing updates for Drupal 6: stay tuned to this site's blog for notices.

EDAM's text originated with instructions for clients of mine, not as a how-to guide for generic unknown users. As such, it doesn't cover installation and initial configuration of Drupal (topics already covered thoroughly by other online documentation). EDAM reflects the ways I personally like to set up and explain sites, which may or may not be ideal for your purposes.

EDAM cheerfully takes some non-standard liberties with terminologies where I've found the usual Drupal way to be confusing. I consider this a bonus!

Finally, EDAM is 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. It's only one entry into a growing ocean of Drupal documentation, but I hope it'll be a helpful island for beginner site administrators in that sea!

Thank you!

Your feedback is wildly appreciated!