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(For more resources on Drupal, see here.)

Not everything that is available in Drupal’s Configuration section is discussed in this article. Some settings are very straightforward and really don’t warrant more than perhaps a brief mention.

Before we start

It is sensible to make note of a few important things before getting our hands dirty. Make it second nature to check how the changes made to the settings affect the site. Quite often settings you modify, or features you add, will not behave precisely as expected and without ensuring that you use a prudent approach to making changes, you can sometimes end up with a bit of a mess.

Changes to the site’s structure (for example, adding new modules) can affect what is and isn’t available for configuration so be aware that it may be necessary to revisit this section.

Click on Configuration in the toolbar menu. You should see something like the following screenshot:

A quick point to mention is that we aren’t giving over much space to the final option—Regional and Language. This is because the settings here are very basic and should give you no trouble at all. There is also an online exercise available to help you with date types and formats if you are interested in customizing these.

Let’s begin!

Site information

This page contains a mixed bag of settings, some of which are pretty self-explanatory, while others will require us to think quite carefully about what we need to do. To start with, we are presented with a few text boxes that control things like the name of the site and the site slogan.

Nothing too earth shattering, although I should point out that different themes implement these settings differently, while some don’t implement them at all.

For example, adding a slogan in the default Garland theme prints it after the site name as shown in the following screenshot:

Whereas, the Stark theme places the slogan beneath the site name:

Let’s assume that there is a page of content that should be displayed by default—before anyone views any of the other content. For example, if you wanted to display some sort of promotional information or an introduction page, you could tell Drupal to display that using this setting. Remember that you have to create the content for this post first, and then determine its path before you tell Drupal to use it. For example, we could reference a specific node with its node ID, but equally, a site’s blogs could be displayed if you substitute node/x (in node/ID format) for the blog.

Once you are looking at the content intended for the front page, take note of the relative URL path and simply enter that into the text box provided.

Recall that the relative URL path is that part of the page’s address that comes after the standard domain, which is shared by the whole site. For example, setting node/2 works because Drupal maps this relative path to http://localhost/drupal/node/2

The first part of this address, http://localhost/drupal/ is the base URL, and everything after that is the relative URL path.

Sometimes, the front page is a slightly more complex beast and it is likely that you will want to consider Panels to create a unique front page. In this case, Panels settings can override this setting to make a specific panel page as the front page.

The following settings allow you to broadly deal with the problem of two common site errors that may crop up during a site’s normal course of operation—from the perspective of a site visitor. In particular, you may wish to create a couple of customized error pages that will be displayed to the users in the event of a “page not found” or “access denied” problem.

Remember that there are already pretty concise pages, which are supplied by default. However, if you wish to make any changes, then the process for creating an error page is exactly the same as creating any other normal page.

Let’s make a change very quickly. Click on Add new content in the Shortcuts menu and select Basic page. Add whatever content you want for, say the Page not found! error:

Don’t worry about the host of options available on this page—we will talk about all of this later on. For now, simply click on the Save button and make note of the URL of the page when it is displayed. Then head back to the Site information page, add this URL to the Default 404 (not found) page dialog, and then click on the Save configuration button:

If you navigate to a page that doesn’t exist, for example, node/3333, you should receive the new error message as follows:

In this example, we asked Drupal to find a node that does not exist yet and so it displayed the Page not found! error message. Since Drupal can also provide content that is private or available to only certain users, it also needs the access denied error to explain to the would-be users that they do not have sufficient permissions to view the requested page. This is not the same as not finding a page, of course, but you can create your own access denied page in exactly the same way.

Finally, you will need to specify how often cron should run in the Automatically run cron drop-down at the bottom of the Site information page. Cronjobs are automated tasks (of any type—they could be search indexing, feed aggregation, and so on) that should run at specified intervals. Drupal uses them to keep itself up-to-date and ensure optimal operation.

Drupal uses web page requests to initiate new cron runs once the specified interval has elapsed. If your website does not get visited regularly, cron itself cannot run regularly.

Running cron every few hours is reasonable for the vast majority of sites. Setting it to run too quickly can create a huge load on the server because each time the cron is run, all sorts of scripts are updating data, performing tasks, and consuming server resources. By the same token, run cron too infrequently and your site’s content can become outdated, or worse, important module, theme, and core updates can go unnoticed, among other things.

Actions and triggers

Quite often, it happens that for specific events, it is useful to have Drupal automatically perform a specified task or action. An action, in the Drupal sense, is one of a number of tasks that the system can perform, and these usually relate to e-mailing people or acting upon user accounts or content. There are a number of simple actions that are available as well as a few more advanced ones that can be set up by anyone with sufficient permissions.

To configure actions, navigate to Actions in SYSTEM under the Configuration menu in the toolbar:

Default simple actions cannot be modified, so we will ignore these for the moment and focus on creating a new, advanced action. Set up a new Send e-mail action by selecting it from the drop-down list and click on the Create button, as shown in the preceding screenshot. This brings up the following page that can be set according to how this specific action will be used:

It should be clear that the intention of this e-mail is to notify the staff/administration of any new site members. The Label field is important in this respect because this is how you will distinguish this action from the other ones that you may create in the future. Make the description as accurate, meaningful, and concise as possible to avoid any potential confusion.

Also notice that there are several placeholder variables that can be inserted into the Recipient, Subject, and Message fields. In this instance, one has been used to inform the e-mail recipient of the new user name, as part of the message.

A click on the Save button adds this new action to the list where it can be modified or deleted, accordingly:

So far so good—we have set the action, but this in itself does absolutely nothing. An action cannot do anything unless there is a specific system event that can be triggered to set it off. These system events are, perspicaciously enough, called triggers and Drupal can look for any number of triggers, and perform the actions that are associated with it—this is how actions and triggers work together.

Triggers are not part of the topic of Drupal configuration. However, we will discuss them here for completeness, since actions and triggers are integrally linked.

Triggers are not enabled by default, so head on over to the Modules section and enable the Triggers module. With the module enabled, there will now be a new Triggers link from the Actions page. Clicking on this brings up the following page:

Triggers are divided into five different categories, each providing a range of triggers to which actions can be attached. Assigning a trigger is basically selecting an action to apply from the drop-down list of the relevant trigger and clicking on the Assign button.

To continue with our example, select the USER tab from the top of the Triggers overlay and, in the TRIGGER: AFTER CREATING A NEW USER ACCOUNT box, select the newly defined action, as shown in the following screenshot:

Click on the Assign button, and the newly assigned action will show up in the relevant trigger box:

In the same way, a large number of actions can be automated depending on the system event (or trigger) that fires. To test this out, log off and register a new account—you will find that the New User Alert e-mail is dutifully sent out once the account has been registered (assuming your web server is able to send e-mail).

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