Best Practices for Drupal Site Administrators

Some people think that managing and maintaining a website is an easy task. Sure, there are menial tasks that must be done such as confirming registrations, checking for errors, and so on. But when your website starts attracting heavy traffic and amassing community members, those menial tasks suddenly become overwhelming. If you want your job as site administrator to become lighter, here is a short list of best practices. 

Site Building 

You don’t want your visitors getting confused with sudden changes in design and layout. So if you’re experimenting with major changes, overhauling the site’s layout, or doing other design revisions, then you should take your website offline first. 

Content Creation 

When you’re in doubt, create a node. But what is a node? In Drupal, you can create a node that may contain different items like links and pictures. You may also make a node for each of those items (i.e. make each image or link an isolated piece of content and then just combine it to make galleries or lists). If you’re planning to change your layout from time to time, go with the latter. For instance, if you place several images into a node to make a gallery, you’ll be stuck with that layout. But if you place one image per node, then you can use those nodes in different names. You may gather several into one gallery, another group into another gallery, and so on. 

Browser Compatibility 

Make sure that you website displays well on any browser. Unfortunately, there are some administrator functions that don’t work perfectly on some.

• IE6 or lower: Doesn’t support tabs and is incompatible with modern PNG files.
• Safari: Text editing features may not work well.

It’s best to stick with IE7 or Firefox. 

Troubleshooting 

When you encounter site issues, check Drupal.org for documentation on how to troubleshoot them. If you can’t find it there, copy/paste the exact error message and simply Google it. Chances are you’ll find someone who has already encountered the same problem and has already figured out a way to solve it.