A Recipe for a Rapid Drupal Site--Part V, Buttoning things up

So far we have gathered our resources, blocked out the site, set up content types, and created some simple views to display that content. In this post, we'll look at:

• Targetting a landing page
• Basics of setting up a Google ad
• Basic user permissions
• Terms and Conditions

Targeting a Landing Page

Unless your site is purely a blogging site, you probably will want to target something other than Drupal's river of news. Any page on your Drupal site can become that default landing page. You can create a page using the page content type that has any kind of introductory text--perhaps embed a photo. After you have created the page that you want to target, go to: /admin/settings/site-information and scroll to the bottom. Replace "node" with the page that you want to target. While on this page, you could update your site's name, mission, and so forth.

Setting Up a Google Ad

• First off, you need to have signed up for Google Adsense.
• Next, enable adsense on your site. Go to /admin/build/modules and check off Adsense core and I used Ads (old). You could also use Managed Ads. This will add new blocks to the block menu.
• Go to /admin/build/block and look for "AdSense: unconfigured"
• Give your block a name, and if you want a title on your page-a title too. Choose an appropriate ad size and if you have configured groups and channels set that here as well.
• If you want your ad to show up on all pages for all users, you're done.

Setting Up Some Basic User Types

• Head over to /admin/user/roles
• Create a new role
• Edit permissions on your new role and choose what level of access you wish to provide for that role. For example, will this role be allowed to blog, use an events calendar, and so forth. Be careful what level of permissions you give---some give more access to administrative areas than others. You don't want to compromise security on your site.

Terms and Conditions

In the second post we enabled checkbox validate and legal. This automatically gives you a terms and conditions page on the site and it requires that your new users accept those terms and conditions before accessing the site fully.

• Go to /admin/settings/legal
• Enter your terms in the appropriate box
• Choose what style of terms you would like to offer your user--Scroll Box, Scroll Box (CSS), HTML Text, Page Link
• If you want additional check boxes, uncollapse the "Additional Checkboxes" section and add the text for those checkboxes.
• Save the page.

Remember at this point to head over to /admin/user/permissions and ensure that all the roles are set up to "view terms and conditions".

The next post we'll finish things up!