Creating New Labs

Overview

This document shows unit administrators or web committee members how to create labs on their Drupal web sites.

Table of Contents

Labs

If your department has labs, you may find this content type useful. Labs can reference Personnel and general Research Areas if you like.

Articles are used for time-sensitive content, like news, press releases, or blog posts. For example, a page about a faculty award, a page with news about the department, or a page listing graduating doctoral students are considered articles. An article is simply a title, with some text in the body. Images can be embedded within the body of the page; one can also have a main image, a banner image (across the top), and/or a gallery of images. Specific personnel, mentioned in the article, can be linked (so that the article automatically links to their directory page at the bottom, and the directory page will link to articles mentioning that personnel). The type of news or audience can be indicated, which will make filtering by audience possible. Tags may be included, so that articles can be sorted by tag. Depending on your unit, research areas can also be linked (as with personnel).

Step 1: Create new lab

First click on 'Content.'

Then 'Add content'

Then click on 'Labs'

You should get to this page:

Step 2: Fill in basic required relevant information

The minimum this page needs to have is Title and About this Lab. See below. 

Step 3: Fill in optional fields

There are lots of optional fields you might want to use. Please see below for an explanation for all of the optional fields for labs.

Lab Summary

When you add a lab, it will be shown on a page listing all of the labs. That page will show a truncated version of the text in the About this Lab section as a summary. If you would prefer to write your own summary, click "Edit Summary" to create that summary. See below: 

Adding Lab Site

You can also add a link to the Lab site(s) related to the lab

To link to a lab site, type any part of the lab name, and the list will autopopulate. Simply choose the lab site you want to link the lab to. 

After selecting a lab site, it will look like this:

Associate Research Areas

If you have research areas defined, you can link to research area(s) associated with the lab:

This field also autocompletes as you type:

When selected, the research area looks like this:

Upload Image

You can also upload an image for the article (or a banner, or even a gallery of images). Basic image is a rectangular presentation, banner is a wide image presentation, and gallery is a group of photos. 

Link to Research Areas

Schedule article to post in future

You can also schedule the article's publication for the future; this is an option on the editing sidebar:

When expanded, it looks like this:

Step 3: Save

After you have saved the page, you will see the visual page. In this example, we linked to a personnel page and a research area, but again this is optional. Here is how it will look. 

Also see Adding images to content for assistance adding an image to an article.