2.2. Control panel home

2.2. Control panel home
Chapter 2. The Admin Interface

Having logged in successfully as a site administrator you are now shown a new menu called “user menu” in the home page. Click on the link Administration menu. This link is unique to you the Webmaster, or site administrator, as we shall refer to in these pages. Click this link to open your Control panel home page!

The control panel home page is the nerve centre for your whole site. You will certainly be spending many happy hours here creating content and administrating, so take some time to become familiar with the functions and facilities available. That “rather empty home page” will soon take on the appearance and usefulness of a truly professionally built Website, providing you plan thoughtfully and experiment with care and some background knowledge.

2.2.1. Some preliminaries before we get started in the admin area

2.2.1.1. JavaScript

JavaScript is used in various functions of the administration section, both to display menus and also within scripts. Please make sure JavaScript is enabled on your local machine. If JavaScript is enabled you will see pop-up menus appear when you hover over “system admin” icon in the control panel home page. If you decide not to activate JavaScript, simply click the icon to return a new page of menus as detailed below.

2.2.1.2. Cache

Much of your site creation and administration will involve changing layout, images, text, and module functions. If you want to see these changes immediately by visiting your web pages, it is important that your browser displays fresh content from the server and not old cache data from your local machine! This particularly affects images. Make certain your browser is set to ignore cache memory when updating your site content.

Let’s begin exploring, learning and creating our site by working through the menus displayed under “System admin” icon. We will work through these alphabetically for convenience, however you may decide to visit the preferences->general settings section first in order to review and set some important options. There is no specific or recommended order for administrating your site, although you may wish to simply create a content block and activate a module, just to see how things work!