When the install script succeeds, you will be directed to the "Welcome" page, and you will be logged in as the administrator already. Proceed with the initial configuration steps suggested on the "Welcome" page.

The "Welcome to your new Drupal website! page" outlines, in brief, with links, the basic steps to setup and start using your Drupal site. Take a moment to review them.

These are the basic steps to setup and configure your Drupal site. This message will stay on your front page until you promote something to it (default behavior) or change the front page setting.

At this time you have one configured account on your site. This account will always have access to your entire site so do not share its password. Later, when testing regular account access, you should use a different account.

Go ahead and select the administer link in the menu. This takes you to the /admin page. This is the administrative starting page for your Drupal site. What you see here will largely depend on what modules you have enabled. If a module is not enabled, you will not have an entry for it.

By default this page is task based and divided into five administrative areas.

  • Content management - Manage your site's content. Most anything to do with content itself will be here.
  • Site building - Control how your site looks and feels. Here you make structure changes to your sites look and feel.
  • Site configuration - Adjust basic site configuration options. Adjust and configure site behavior, name, email settings, cache, date and time, etc.
  • User Management - Manage your site's users, groups and access to your site features. Here you can manage accounts, users, roles and default registration requirements.
  • Reports - View reports from system logs and other status information. Various logs and information on your site are located here.

So, if by default the view is task based, take a look near the top and select By module. This will give you a quick link view to various modules configuration settings and help. Once you are more familiar with what you want to do on your site, this can be a quick way to get to the desired menus. After a review, go back to the "By task" view.

Notes

  • A new install will have the message "Cron has not run. Please visit the status report for more information.". Please make sure to set up cron. Running cron.php on a regular basis performs basic maintenance and helps keep your site healthy.
  • If you haven't enabled the clean URLs option for your site, adding a /?q=admin/ after your website domain address will direct you to your admin area.

    For example:

    MyWebsite.com/?q=admin/

  • If the default Drupal theme is not displaying properly and links on the page result in "Page Not Found" errors, try manually setting the $base_url variable in the settings.php file if not already set. It's currently known that servers running FastCGI can run into problems if the $base_url variable is left commented out (see http://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=19656).