Drupal 8 - Logging in and getting started on your site

Overview

This page will help you as unit administrator or member of your unit's web committee get started on your Drupal 8 site.

Steps

Logging into your site

If your site has already launched

You can usually find the login screen under the Faculty and Staff section of your site, as in this example on the Department of Anthropology's website.

Or you can just add /user to your main url to get to the login screen.

Use your UGA myID and password to log into the site.

If you cannot access your site but know that you should be able to, please put in a ticket to the Franklin OIT Helpdesk via helpdesk.franklin.uga.edu.

If your site is in development

Visit your site's development url on the Franklin testing servers.

Your site will have a special development url while we are working on it together. It is usually your department or unit's four-letter code, plus "test.franklin.uga.edu."

For example, the Department of Anthropology's development url was https://anth.test.franklin.uga.edu, and English's was https://engl.test.franklin.uga.edu.

You can only access these development websites on campus, or with Remote Access VPN provided by EITS. Follow the link to set that up if you anticipate performing much work on your site from beyond campus.

To login, add /user to the url of your development site.

Use your UGA myID and password to log into the site.

Once you are logged in

The login will bring you to your user account profile.

My user account name is "lblais."

This is not the same thing as a personnel page; it is only your user account info. We can't do anything with this, so ignore the "edit" button here.

If you click on your department's name, you can get to the front page.

Now that we are logged in, I see a black and white administration menu at the top.

I'll talk more about the links in the admin menu in a minute, but first I want us to click around a bit and learn about the different parts of the site, specifically the distinction between content and lists of content.

Differences between individual pieces of content and lists of content

Click around. Sometimes, you'll see an edit tab at the top of a piece of content.

In this example, I've clicked on a page from the main menu called "Test page."

I see that there is an "Edit" tab below the title.

This means that I can click edit to directly begin editing what is there.

This piece of content titled "Test Page" is made with a content template called "Basic Page." I know this because at the top it says "Edit Basic Page Test Page."

If you don't see an edit tab, it means that you're looking at a list of content.

Perhaps most obvious example of this is the Directory or People list.

I don't see an edit button on this "page." That is because it is not a "page" per se, but a list of content made with the "Personnel" content template.

When I click on one of the people, like Katherine Johnson, I now see an edit button.

Now, if I click "edit," I am able to edit this content.

I see that instead of "Basic Page," it is made with the content template "Personnel," because it says "Edit Personnel Katherine Johnson" at the top.

We could make an entire site out just by using the Basic Page content template alone. But by using different custom content templates, we can make content to be filtered and sorted dynamically throughout the site.

For example, because we use the Personnel content template for people instead of Basic Page, we are able to sort Faculty, Staff and Grad Students by the Last Name field, which was specifically added to the Personnel content template for that very reason.

If you go to Content and click on the Add Content button, you an see all the different content templates available to you.

For a detailed description of what each content template is used for, and where it shows up, I've created a doc called "Default Content Templates and Displays."