Creating Content in Drupal 7

(For more resources on Drupal 7, see here.)

Creating content for your site is at the core of any Content Management System like Drupal. The primary changes for Drupal 7 relate to an updated interface. Let’s look at the new interface in detail.

Selecting a content type to create

To create content in Drupal 7, first log in to your site and then click on Content from the site toolbar. Drupal will now display the new Content Administration page.

Move mouse over the image to enlarge it.

In Drupal 6, this page could be displayed by selecting Administer | Content Management | Content from the Navigation menu.

From here, click on the Add new content link. Drupal will now display a page allowing you to select the type of content you want to create. Depending on the modules you have installed and enabled, you will have different content types available.

In previous versions of Drupal, this page could be reached by selecting the Create Content link from the Navigation menu.

You can also select the type of content to add using the shortcut bar. You can access the shortcut bar by clicking on the toggle at the far right of the toolbar:

The shortcut bar has a list of links in it that can be used to quickly access commonly used functionality, and it appears as follows:

You can customize the links in the shortcut bar and users can use either the default set of shortcuts or they can have their own.

Now select the type of content you want to create. For this example, we will use the Basic page type.

Content UI

The interface to create content has been altered drastically from Drupal 6. Let’s go through the interface in detail.

The top section of the page should be familiar to experienced editors. This is the place to enter your title as well as the full text of the page. In a departure from previous versions, the node summary, which is used when multiple nodes are displayed on a page, is an entirely separate optional field.