Introduction

When developing a Drupal website sooner or later you will come to the point where you do not like that empty-ish look of it. You would want to start creating your own content, customize it and enrich the look of your site. In this guide, we will cover the very first and basic step of this process - creating a new page. It is extremely simple, so if you are ready, let's jump right into it!

Accessing the Content page

For a start, please log in to your Drupal Admin Dashboard and navigate through the Administration toolbar to Manage > Content.

As soon as you land on the "Content" page, please click on the blue "+ Add content" button located in the upper left corner.

Creating a New Page

On the "Add content" page, you will need to first select the content type. There are two main types of content in Drupal:

• Articles - You can think of Articles as blog posts, media releases, columns, etc. They are mainly used for content that is expected to change more frequently. Eventually, you will have multiple articles that could be on any given topic related to your website.
• Basic Pages - The pages, on the other hand, are not expected to change as often. In other words, they are considered as something more static, such as an "About Us" page, "Contact" page, etc.

Since we will be creating a New Page in this tutorial, naturally, you will need to click on the "Basic page" link. For the purpose of our guide, we will be creating a custom Front Page for our website.

Upon clicking on the link, you will be redirected to the "Create Basic page" page. Now that you are where you are supposed to be, let's review each piece of information you will need to specify. We will start with the left section of the page.

You would want to start by giving your page a "Title" which will represent the page on your website and it will be used in the browser title bar.

Below the "Title" field, you will see the "Body (Edit summary)" panel where you will need to insert the actual page content. This is the WYSIWYG editor built-in Drupal. It includes some quite useful tools which will make the whole formatting, inserting links, media, etc. extremely easy. So, do not hesitate to explore the tools to get the best of them. 

Right below the content box, you will see the "Text Format" dropdown menu which will allow you to change the text formatting used in the editor. If you are not sure what exactly you could achieve with the available format types, you can always click on the "About text formats" links and explore your possibilities.

At the very bottom of the page, you will see a checkbox and two buttons.

• Published - This checkbox controls whether the page will be automatically published upon saving it. As you will notice it is checked by default. On some occasions, you might not want to publish the page immediately. If you uncheck the box, the page will be saved only in your Drupal backend and ready to be published when the time comes.
• Save - Pretty self-explanatory - clicking on this button will save the page.
• Preview - This button allows you to check the actual look of the page while you are working on it.

Now, please do not hurry to save the page, as there are few additional fields we have not discussed yet. We will need you to pay attention to the right side of the page where you will notice a few meta boxes. They can be expanded by clicking on the corresponding arrow icon.

In the first section, you will be able to manage the revisioning of this page. This option comes in handy when multiple people are working on your website. A brief message describing the changes performed could be left for future references.

Under the second "Menu Settings" section you will notice only one checkbox - uncheck by default. It allows you to include the page in your website menu if needed. If this is the case, once the checkbox is ticked, you will be presented with a few additional fields. You will need to enter the menu link title which will be used in the menu itself, enter a description which will be displayed when hovered over the page title, select the "Parent item", i.e. the menu, and specify the weight which will determine the position of the page in the menu (the lower the value is, the higher the item will be positioned).

Now, please expand the following three sections, so we can review and discuss them.

The "URL Alias" section is where you can input the so-called Search Engine Friendly URL. SEO-Friendly URLs are used for improving SEO and user experience since they are easier to read by humans. The text entered here should start with forward-slash (/) and should be only the part that will appear after your domain, e.g. "/front-page". When entering it, please make sure to use lower case letters only and replaces all spaces with dashed (-). We strongly recommend you to define relevant "URL alias" for all your pages and articles.

Next is the "Authoring Information" section which contains details related to the submission of the page. You will be able to edit the time of page publishment and its author, in case it is necessary.

Under the last "Promotion Options" section you will find the following two checkbox settings:

• Promoted to front page - Ticking this checkbox will create a teaser on the home page welcoming your visitors to click on in order to access the full page.
• Sticky at top of lists - Ticking this checkbox will make this page the first in the list of promoted pages available at your Home Page.

At this point, you know every bit of the process of creating a basic page and you are ready to hit the "Save" button to publish it.

Congratulations! You have just learned how to create a New page in Drupal. We hope the information provided in this guide was useful to you and our instructions clear enough to follow. In case you have any questions on the topic, you are always welcome to address them to our Support Team.