Here is some basic information to help out with getting used to using Drupal.

The following Youtube video was set up for someone else's site, but it's useful for sites which use drupal in general. It contains a basic walkthrough on how to post pages or stories:

submitting articles

Once logged on, you should see a new menu on the left side of the screen.

2. Click "create content" --> story

You can also create a Page though a Page is generally slightly less useful than a Story. If you want to create a contact page or an about page, use a page.

Stories are articles in their simplest form: they have a title, a teaser and a body, but can be extended by other modules. The teaser is part of the body too. Stories may be used as a personal blog or for news articles.

3. Here you can fill in the form, copy and paste. Click submit to post your story.
To post a story in a specific section, the Categories are important! If set up, they relate to the side menus for the respective sections.

Page Breaks: This determines when a Teaser for an article ends. To create a page break insert the tag: where you want the teaser to stop. Using Richtext, click on this symbol:

On the content creation pages there are a number of options (most of which you never need to mess with)

1. enable rich text

Click this to be able to format the text using an interface similar to a simple word processor like Microsoft Word. Clicking this will switch between the text editor and showing the raw html.

2. Input Format

Clicking here gives you some options on how drupal will filter your submission. you can play with this if the text that should have contained paragraphs comes out in one long block or if paragraphs show up unexpectedly. try switching between Filtered and unfiltered html.

Caution! Using unfiltered html is useful for copying and pasting raw html into the story. However be careful to make sure all tags are properly balanced (ie. <strong> also contains it's friend </strong>). Not doing this could cause havoc in the general layout.

3. Log Message

you can type notes to yourself or others in this box. only admins and editors can see it.

4. Comment Settings

are for allowing others to post comments on your article.

5. Menu Settings

create a menu item in the Sidebar if you have your menus set up using the drupal Menu module. (at site.org/admin/build/menu)

6. File attachments

Here you can upload documents, sound files or images. For using images see below.

7. URL Path Settings

This is where you can create the url address for the page. eg: if you type in the box: cabron, the page name will be : sitename.org/cabron

Note: Avoid spaces and strange symbols. Substitute _ for spaces when necessary.

9. Authoring Information

This shows who posted the article and when it was posted. Changing the date can be usefull sometimes to change the order of postings.

10. Publishing Options

You'll see the following options:

Images

Including images in your post is easy.

1. Make sure it's a jpg, gif or png file ideally saved at 72 dpi (screen resolution) as close to the size you want it to appear as as possible (do this in something like Photoshop, Gimp or Fireworks first).

2. Use File Attachment to upload the image to the site. Click Attach. The url for the image should show up underneath the name of the file. Copy this url ( select it and hit ctrl+C).

3. Using the Rich Text Editor, click the image box (a picture of a tree). A window will appear where you can paste in the url (ctrl+V). Click Insert.

4. using html use the tag: <img src="http://nameofurl.com/image.jpg" align="right">

Blocks

Blocks are the things that appear on the left or sometimes right hand side of the page, usually containing menus, but can also contain graphics, forms or text.

You can configure a block by clicking Admin -> Site Building --> Blocks (or directly via http://sitename.org/admin/build/block )

here you can configure the block layout by choosing left or right sidebar , turn blocks off by setting their region to None or edit their contents by clicking Configure.

extensive information about drupal can be found here: http://drupal.org/handbooks