Prior to creating new content, decide what type of format you want to use for your content display. Options include categories such as 'Blog', 'Page', 'Story', 'Book Page'. Browse to see the naming convetions used for the page titles and URLs.

This tutorial will cover the steps to create a 'Book Page'. The steps for other types of content are very similar.

Feel free to create a draft of the page but leave it 'unpublished' as described below. The webmasters can follow up to answer questions or finalize the publishing of the page.

Most content is presented in 'pages'. Front page content is created in 'stories' that are typically short features that are temporary.

First click the link to create content as shown in Fig. 1:

Figure 1. Navigation Menu

Next, from the new content menu (not shown), select the type of content you wish to create -- in this case a 'Book Page'. When the editor form opens, enter the page title as shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2. Title, Content Classification and Menu Settings for a new page.

The 'Title' in Fig. 2 will become the text for the link. In this case, the book page will be minutes, so the document link will be the date of the meeting. The 'Content Classification' in Fig. 2 is used only for selected content such as minutes. If the classifications don't apply, just leave it unspecified. Classifications help focus web searching.

The 'Menu Settings' link in Fig. 2 is only used for content that is to appear in one of the menus, so most pages will not use these settings.

Using the text editor

The site has a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor which works for most editing tasks (Fig 3). The editor box has buttons across the top. The buttons are largely self-explanatory. When using the editor, hover the cursor over the buttons for a short description.

Fig 3. Partial image of the editor with the toolbar at the top. The cursor is pointing to the button used to paste from Microsoft Word.

Pasting from Microsoft Word

Rather than uploading Word documents, it is best to copy/paste the content into a web page. There is a special button used to paste from Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word tends to insert a bunch of formatting JUNK that needs to be removed when pasting via a special paste dialog box. Select the entire content from Word, and copy to the clipboard. Then in the web page editor, click the toolbar clipboard with the W as shown in Fig. 3. The 'Paste from Word' dialog box in Fig. 4 will pop up.

Fig. 4. Dialong box used to paste from Word

Paste the text in the white box as described in the dialog box in Fig. 4. The lower to checkboxes are done automatically in the newer editor so the checkboxes won't appear.

Inserting Images

If you are inserting images, click the button on the editor toolbar that looks like a picture of a mountain (not shown here). This will open a dialog box for the IMCE file manager to select or upload images. Usually, you will be uploading new images. The box appears below in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5. Dialog box to insert image.

Click 'Browse Server', and the dialog box in Fig. 6 below will appear. The left pane list the folders and the right pane lists the content of the active folder.  Usually the best image folder is 'sharedImages'. The highlighted row is the selected image. Note the image preview in the lower pane.

Fig. 6. Dialog box for IMCE file manager.

Before uploading a new image, give the image a meaningful name on your local computer because you are not permitted to rename the image after upload. Move to the desired target folder in the IMCE file manager as illustrated in the left panel of Fig.6, and click 'Upload' near the top of the IMCE window. The 'File' box opens in the IMCE window as shown below in Fig. 7.

Fig 7. Upload dialog region of the IMCE file manager.

Click the 'Browse' button and select the image using the dialog box on your local computer. After selection, the image file will be listed next to the browse button of the IMCE file manager. Click  'Upload' in the IMCE file manager window. Next, click 'Insert file' along the top edge of the IMCE file manager (see upper right of Fig. 7). The system will return to the 'Image Properties' box as in the example of Fig 6. Add a description in the 'Alternative Text' box. The description will preload before the figure and also be available when a user hovers over the figure, or uses a screen reader for accessibility. The other boxes are optional. Click OK.

Uploading files to link in the content

Creating a link to a document such as an uploaded pdf file is very similar to uploading an image.

Before you start the upload, change the name of the document on your local computer to the name you want to use on the website.

In the WYSIWYG editor window, create the text that you want to use for the link and select the text.

From the WYSIWYG editor toolbar, click the button that looks like a chain link.

When the 'Link' dialog box appears, you can select 'Browse Server' and upload a document much in the same way that the image upload is described, except you will store the document in the 'SharedDocs' or other document folder.

Touching up the final page

For complex documents, sometimes the page needs fine adjustments that cannot be done with with the WYSIWYG editor window. The editor sometimes gets confused about the exact location of a HTML tag. You may click the 'Source' button (see upper left of Fig. 3), or the link 'Switch to plain text editor' below the editor window. A truncated snapshot of the link below the window is shown below in Fig. 8. HTML uses 'tags' to demark content type. For example: <p> starts a paragraph; <table> starts a table.  Tag explanations can be found by clicking 'More information...'. The webmasters can help touch up a page if reading the tags is confusing.

Fig 8. Example links from below the WYSIWYG editor window as well as a listing of permitted html tags.

Adding a page to a book.

'Books' are helpful to provide navigation through a series of related pages by providing an automated table of contents and links for browsing from one book page to the next and previous. For example, Board and Neighborhood Minutes pages are inserted chronologically into 'books', but other pages usually are not. To insert a page into a book, use the appropriate existing book. Talk with the webmasters if you are interested in starting a new book. Use the 'weight' to make the newest notes float to the top (small or negative weight). However, it is best to leave the weights alone and then the content will sort alphabetically.

Figure 9. Expanded menu for adding content to a book.

Revisions

Drupal can save backups of the web pages as new revisions are made. Use of backups is helpful in case you realize that you have messed up a page when editing! The revisions are available from a tab at the top of the page when viewing a page after logging in. As shown in Fig. 10, notes can be inserted to record comments about the changes that were made.

Fig. 10 Specification to create a new revision, saving the previous version of the page.

Setting the page URL

The URL path settings (Fig. 11) specify the URL. Without a URL path, the URL will be 'ugly'. For example the true URL of this page is http://brookfieldneighborhood.net/node/60, but it is set for alias http://brookfieldneighborhood.net/how-to/createpage. Either will work in the URL bar, but the later is more meaningful. The leading 'http://brookfieldneighborhood.net' is NOT included in the URL path. Also not the absence of a leading slash.

Fig. 11 Specification of the page URL that can be used to

Board Minutes are titled 'YYYY-MM-DD', and the URLs are 'board/minutes/YYYY-MM'
Neighborhood minutes are titled, 'YYYY, Month DD' and the URLs are 'minutes/YYYY-Mnth', where Mnth is abbrebiated 'Sept' usually.

Permitting or denying comments from users

Comment settings (Fig. 12) control whether logged in users are able to make comments in response to the page content. Authoring information should be editing if you are editing an existing page. Clear out the revision date and leave blank to have the current date/time inserted on save.

Fig 12. Comment settings and Authoring link.

Saving the draft or publishing content.

Finally, the page can be a draft until the 'Published' box is checked using the the checkboxes shown in Fig. 13. Usually, only 'story' content or special content is promoted to the front page. The box for 'sticky' makes the current item stay at the top of lists even when newer content is posted.

Fig 13. Selection boxes for publishing.

Be careful about the settings for "Send subscriptions notifications." Whenever this box is checked, the system will send notices of new/revised content to ALL subscribers. This is often NOT intented for a page that is being edited for minor formatting changes. The box is checked by default each time a page loads/reloads, so you must be careful with the status before saving the file.

The 'Preview' button (not shown) is helpful to check the display, but it does not save the page. Some links may not work in preview mode, but the layout of the page can be checked. Be aware that once a page is published, you cannot save drafts. Any updates are 'live' when you click to save.

Contact the webmasters with questions or suggestions for improving this page.