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Basic Drupal site settings
If you haven’t set up your Drupal site’s basic settings already, now is a good time with your shiny new theme installed!
Visit the theme settings page for your Fusion theme to add the basics, such as your site’s name, logo, and slogan. You can access this settings page at Administration > Site building > Themes, and click the “Configure” link next to your current theme (Drupal 6) or Appearance > Find your theme > Settings (Drupal 7).
Changing the site name, slogan, mission statement, and footer message
Fusion has many, many options for theme configuration that are unavailable in any other themes. But some basic settings are part of Drupal’s core, and are common to all themes. You change them by going to /admin/settings/site-information (Drupal 6) or Configuration→Site information (Drupal 7) on your site.
There are a few settings in the “Toggle display” area of your theme configuration that are of particular interest. In Drupal 6, these options are located at Administer > Site Building > Themes > Theme name > configure. In Drupal 7 they are at Appearance > Theme name > Settings. These options are:
Name: This shows up in the title bar of your browser when you visit the site, and optionally at the top of every page if you’ve turned on the “Site name” option. The Name can contain HTML entities (for example, é for é).
Slogan: A short blurb that shows up in the browser’s title bar on the site’s front page. If you’ve turned on the “Site slogan” option, it also shows up in the header region next to the name, in a similar (or complementary) style.
Drupal 6 allows for some additional things to be set on the Site information page:
Footer message: This appears at the very bottom of every page, below even the “footer” regions for blocks. It can be full HTML, and in fact many designers put links in this area. Drupal 7 has removed this section, but you can add it yourself this way: How do I add a footer message or other custom text in Drupal 7?
You can find out about other fields on this page on this page (about Anonymous users and E-mail addresses) and this page (about the default front page).
If you’re an experienced Drupal administrator, you’re used to seeing a checkbox here to turn on the “Mission statement”, which is a blurb that usually shows up on the site’s front page, near the top. We found that, in practice, few people understood or included a mission statement, so we removed that setting.
But with Fusion, you can still mimic the function of the mission statement – or even include several mission statements, if you like. And unlike in core Drupal, your mission statements can include graphics or any other content. Just create a block with your mission statement and put it in an appropriate block region: Preface Top, Preface Bottom, and Content Top are most similar to the traditional location for mission statements. Then, give this block the “Callout” style. Much better, no?
Customize the logo and shortcut icon
It’s easy to change the graphics in a Fusion theme. There are two specific graphics that are especially easy to change: the clickable site logo in the upper-left corner, and the 16-by-16-pixel “shortcut” icon next to the URL in your browser’s address bar. For these changes, you don’t even need access to the server: Just a few clicks in Drupal’s web-based interface does it. Here’s how.
Changing the logo:
- Go to the theme administration page at /admin/build/themes , then click the “configure” link next to your theme (Drupal 6) or Appearance > (Your theme) Settings (Drupal 7).
- In the “Toggle display” section, make sure the Logo checkbox is checked.
- In the “Logo image settings” section, uncheck the “Use the default logo” checkbox.
- If you’ve already uploaded the graphic to your server, you can type in its path directly in the “Path to custom logo” box. Otherwise, click the Browse button, find the graphic you want to use on your computer, then scroll to the bottom of the screen and click “Save configuration”. Drupal uploads that graphic to your default file location – usually /sites/default/files/ , unless you’ve changed it on the File system administration screen at /admin/settings/file-system (Drupal 6) or Configuration > File system (Drupal 7).
- Don’t immediately see a change? Try doing a “power refresh” (holding down shift or command) in your browser to throw away the old version in your browser’s cache.
Note that Drupal will display the logo exactly as it went in, at full size. Since the logo is in the header – and therefore pushes content down on the screen – it’s a good idea to keep logo graphics fairly short, i.e. under 120 pixels high.
Changing the shortcut icon (“favicon”):
- Go to the theme administration page at /admin/build/themes, then click the “configure” link next to your theme (Drupal 6) or Appearance > (Your theme) Settings (Drupal 7).
- In the “Toggle display” section, make sure the “Shortcut icon” checkbox is checked.
- In the “Shortcut icon settings” section, uncheck the “Use the default shortcut icon” checkbox.
- If you’ve already uploaded the graphic to your server, you can type in its path directly in the “Path to custom icon” box. Otherwise, click the Browse button, find the graphic you want to use on your computer, then scroll to the bottom of the screen and click “Save configuration”. (PNG and GIF graphics are best, as some versions of Internet Explorer don’t recognize JPG shortcut icons.) Drupal uploads that graphic to your default file location – usually /sites/default/files/ , unless you’ve changed it on the File system administration screen at /admin/settings/file-system (Drupal 6) or Configuration > File system (Drupal 7).
- Don’t immediately see a change? Try doing a “power refresh” in your browser to throw away the old version in your browser’s cache.
Unlike with the site logo, visitors will see the shortcut icon in its proper size in the address bar. Drupal doesn’t actually shrink the graphic itself: It’s stored at full size on your server. It’s a good idea to shrink the file down manually in a graphics program to 16 pixels square.
How to enable/disable quick links to block styling
With Fusion, no longer do you have to go through the block page – a process that takes several clicks. There is a handy configuration icon for each block that is turned on by default, so you should just see the block-configuration icon when you hover your pointer over any block.
If for some reason you don’t see this effect, here’s how you turn it on (or off, if you don’t want it).
- Go to the theme configuration screen at /admin/build/themes/settings, then click “configure” next to your theme
- In the “Fusion theme settings” section, scroll down and click “Administrator settings”
- Check the “Display block configure links for administrators” box
In Drupal 7, this functionality requires that the Drupal core module Contextual Links is enabled and that the user has the proper permissions to access that module’s output. Read more in the Drupal documentation for Contextual Links.
