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The importance of content
Adding content to your Drupal site is crucial to making your theme come to life.
This may sound obvious to Drupal pros, but we’ve found that it’s a challenging concept for those who are new to Drupal. We get questions like this all the time:
I enabled the theme – where’s my blog page?
Why don’t I see that picture at the top of the page?
How do I add the right sidebar?
The trick is that these things rely on having nodes and blocks added to your site. It’s not very sexy sounding, but a Drupal site without content is kind of like an uninflated balloon. Only once you have a bit of content to play with can you then place it into regions, create views to list it in different ways, and create new sections or pages to link to from your menus.
If you’re working on a brand new site, before you continue with configuring your layout and styles, step away from the theme for a bit and think about the content that’s going to be on your site. Maybe you’re going to have some news items on your front page, so you’d first want to add some Story nodes (even if they’re just dummy text for now!). Or you have an “About us” page or contact form that needs to be added to your Primary links menu. Or you know you’re going to have some text blocks listing your product’s top features, or your company address, or showing the latest comments on the site.
Or maybe something requiring additional Drupal modules, like an image gallery, ads, or a calendar.
Whatever it is that your site will be, the next steps will go much more smoothly (and be a lot more fun!) if you get this functionality and some content in place first.
Adding menus
Drupal includes two sets of menus by default: Administrative (Development and Navigation) and User (Primary and Secondary links). The user based menus need links added to them in order to show up.
Your Fusion theme will include styling for both of these menus. The Primary links are usually used as your site’s main navigation, with somewhere around 4-8 menu items. The Secondary links are usually less prominent, and at the top of your header. This menu is good for utility links that you always want present on your site, but aren’t part of the main navigation, such as “my account” or “search” links.
These menus also become available as a block, which you can place anywhere on your site.
Drupal 6:
Visit Administration > Site building > Menus > Primary links (and Secondary links) to add menu items to your site. If they are enabled in the theme settings, you should now see menus in the header of your website.
Drupal 7:
Drupal 7’s default menus are different than those in Drupal 6. Development and Navigation menus remain, but Primary and Secondary menus are no longer named in the list. Instead, under Structure > Menu > Settings, you can set the Main links and Secondary links. These are your primary and secondary menus, and you choose from a list of menus already created.
More about these menus and enabling dropdown navigation for your main menu can be found below.
