Configuring Drupal for McNiff Plumbing & Heating

As mentioned in my last post on Selecting Drupal for McNiff Plumbing & Heating, I wanted to talk about configuring Drupal for a mostly static site.

The requirements are:

• Anonymous Users can view all content
• The site is Page oriented; Home, Services, Comments, Contact Us
• No navigation menu
  
• No login options visible to anonymous users
• No content titles, author information or posting dates on pages
• No user comment links

To start with, I went to Administer >> Site Building >> Blocks and disabled nearly all the blocks. I changed the Navigation block to be visible only to Authenticated Users.

I then created the following pages: Home, Services & Comments and copied some of the content from the current site as a place holder. I also set the Menu Title Links in each of these pages to their base name, so that it could be referenced from a menu.

I used Administer >> Site Building >> Menus >> Primary Links to add a menu item for each page.

Next up was creating the Contact Us form. I enabled the Contact module in the Core - optional section, wen to "Administer By Module" and configured the permissions for the Contact Form and enabled "access site-wide contact form" for all users.

Back to the Menus to add a new Primary Link menu option for Contact by specifying the "contact" page as the target. After saving this new menu item, it was showing up as a new tab with the other menu pages. Great!

Let's check for an anonymous users. I opened up a different browser (I just hate logging out and in and out and in) and checked the development site. No joy in Mudville -- and no tab either.

Somewhere along the line, I was missing permissions. I checked and double checked that the menu was enabled and that anonymous users could access the contact form. I even typed the path into the other browser and the form displayed. Hmmm; not a permission problem because the anonymous user could see the form. The navigation link was simply not being displayed.

Back to Administer >> Site Building >> Contact Form >> Edit. There is a "Selected" option, which was set to "No". Changing that to "Yes" turned on the tab in the Anonymous User's view.

Yea!

Next up; clean up the pages to show only the pieces of information we want. This might require a custom View.