On a new install of Drupal I think the sidebar after login should look like this ie username and options to ‘create content’ etc. In my present practice install I don’t have this sidebar so I think I have somehow turned it off. I can log on as different users but each time there are no user options in the sidebar or anywhere else to ‘create content’ etc and I can only get to the ‘create content’ area by writing the URL in the address bar.
Any suggestions please for how to get back my logged in user sidebar??
Hey Julian,
Glad you got that sorted out… I figured it would have been in blocks.
As far as not overwhelming the newbie content manager, that’s where Roles/Permissions come in to play. Drupal has way to many options for the new user/editor/admin person… So what I do is create an editor or staff ‘Role’ under User Management -> Roles (the-site-url/admin/user/roles) and assign it very limited access to the CMS in Permissions (the-site-url/admin/user/permissions).
Maybe just access to the Administration Menu, Comments, Nodes, etc… You’ll have to experiment to get the combination that works for your users.
That way, you get to access all the controls that you need as the master admin but nobody else will get distracted by all of the options.
Do you want them to be able to create new pages or just edit what’s there? I’m asking because if that’s the case then you can just not allow them to access the Admin Menu and they will still be able to edit existing pages.
The Admin menu will unfortunately show heading for stuff they can’t access. That’s the way it works. Whenever I hand the reigns of a site over to a normal “editor” user, I let them know that they have a restricted role so that they can do their job without the distraction of all of the admin tools. They pretty much get it and are happy to edit and create.
I just had a quick peek at the admin menu and they don’t id the <li> tags or the <a> tags so even creating a css method to hide the items you don’t want based on user level or user id would be very tricky.
OK but I am more thinking of a simple menu for a non-technical authenticated user ie is create and edit content but not seeing any admin options. So would this kind of user need to see something like what I posted above = this or do you mean that the dropdown admin menu module can display differently for different users?
I sometimes depending on the site, get rid of the login because it’s messy. I go to (the-site-url/user) to login.
Your Navigation, Login and stuff are managed in the Blocks section of the site. I’d go into blocks and see where all the logins and navigation items have gone (the-site-url/admin/build/block).
Do yourself a huge favor and get Admin Menu. You can get rid of all the peripheral stuff that clutters up your page and still access everything through a compact drop down menu system. After you have uploaded it to sites/all/modules, activate it in the modules section (the-site-url//admin/build/modules).
At the moment my user has no ‘site building’, ‘user management’ etc permissions but the ‘site building’, ‘user management’ etc headings are still showing up in the Admin menu, and after clicking say ‘You do not have any administrative items’. Is this normal because I don’t want these headings in the menu at all. The menu headings are currently Content management, Site building, Site configuration and Help but of these I only want ‘Content management’.