How do I access the drupal admin panel.

September 27, 2008 2:56 PM

Three drupal questions 1. I disabled the log in form on the main page, now how do I get to the admin panel? (Please note, I have a local install of drupal, php, MySQL and Apache for Dev purposes.) 2. How can I create drop down menus? 3. Is there a way I can change the layout for a certain page? Such as I want the main page to be two columns while others to be one with tables or something to that effect for grid data. How can I do this?
posted by BoldStepDesign to computers & internet (6 answers total)

1. To login, you should always be able to go to http://yourhost/user to get to the login page. Unless you do extra actions to disable that page of course. And if you're already logged in and want to get to the admin panel, you can visit http://yourhost/admin/ to see it.

2. I don't know off the top of my head, but you should be able to use pretty standard DHTML stuff to insert dropdown menus using your theme or a module. Drupal by default includes JQuery now, so you have a pretty powerful Javascript library to use as well. Quickly searching Google, I found Nice Menus which might do what you want. Look around.

3. I recall there being a few modules that let you do custom pages, or you can go whole hog and create new page.tpl.php files. For example, if the internal URL of the page you want to treat specially that's accessible at yourhost/grid you can create copy page.tpl.php in your current theme to page-grid.tpl.php and do whatever you want to that. Using different page templates depending on the current path talks about that.

The tricky I've found about Drupal is that there are a lot of different ways to do almost every task, so deciding on the best way is really the challenge.
posted by skynxnex at 3:19 PM on September 27, 2008

If you're a PHP whiz, you may find that the best way to figure out how some Drupal functionality works is to dig in to the source code. It's reasonably well organized and laid out. At least, that's what I've found.

There's also a very helpful IRC channel and, of course, drupal.org.
posted by meta_eli at 7:20 PM on September 27, 2008

Usually, for #1, I add "/?q=user" (no quotes) at the end of the main page URL. At least, that's what I do on my current machine. Try it out.

2. Not sure about this one.

3. I'm guessing Views would be your best bet. It's pretty much a must-have for any Drupal installation.
posted by curagea at 8:00 PM on September 27, 2008

Slight correction: my solution to #1 should work with any Drupal installation.
posted by curagea at 8:02 PM on September 27, 2008

Thanks guys to log in I took your advise. /?q=user To admin /admin didn't work, its /?q=admin
weird I know.

The question for #2 is, if I make a page or story a secondary link, will can I make that as a drop down under the parent?
posted by BoldStepDesign at 8:06 PM on September 27, 2008

Regarding your question #2 -- the site I'm currently building in Drupal uses Nice Menus for dropdown menus, as skynxnex has identified. Nice Menus is one of the modules that actually has some good documentation to get it up and running. Basically, though, you need to be using Drupal's menu system to structure your site. Then, when you create a new page (or story), you can open the "Menu settings" area to select the appropriate "Parent item." And, voila!, a link will show up under that parent in the dropdown. (You can also go straight to the "Menus item" in the "Site building" section of the Admin section to specify the various parent-child relationships between the pages on your site.)

As for #3, there are several ways to have different layouts for different pages. Depending on how involved you want to get, you could use a module like Panels or you could modify (and create) .tpl.php files, as skynxnex mentions (see PHPTemplate). I've been able to do what you want (I think) in conjunction with the Zen Theme (more good documention). It's a three-column layout, with an optional sidebar on either side. Basically, when you crate a new page, your main body text will span the entire width of the page unless you place a block in either the left or the right sidebar. So, for instance, most of the pages on my site are 3-col layouts, with a block containing local navigation in the left sidebar and blocks of related content in the right sidebar and the main body content in the center. For pages that have extra-wide content, such as tables or maps, I simply don't place any blocks in the right sidebar and the content automatically expands across those two columns.
posted by kittydelsol at 2:11 PM on September 28, 2008