Publishing and Promotion Options

Like any document you will want to save your webpage often, at the bottom of the edit form you will find saving options.

Published/Unpublished

The first option in this section is a checkbox to publish or unpublish your page.  Published pages are available to the public, while unpublished drafts are only available to those with editing access.  If you have not finished your page yet and your just saving it to take a look you will want to uncheck this box.

Preview

Clicking preview will load the page as it will look published, near the top will be a link to return to editing.  Beware you haven't saved while in preview, you will have to go back to edit view and save or you will lose your work.

Save

This will commit your work to the website.  Save Often! 

Some content types keep track of previous revisions.  If the content you are editing does this dialog gives you the opportunity to save an internal comment with the current revision.

When creating pages it is important to place them on the Menu.  This allows both your users and search engines to understand the structure of the website.  Drupal will also use the location of a page in the menu to assign an URL to the page.  So a page called "People" under "About Us" would be located at mysite.osu.edu/about-us/people.

To add a page to the menu check the "Provide a menu link" box. This will bring up the form to the right.

• Menu link title: Automatically the menu link title will be the same as the page title. However if your page title is longer, this may not be good for menu tabs and links, so you can edit the title here to create a more effective menu link.
• Description: This will be the tool tip when a user hovers over the menu link.
• Parent link: This drop down will bring up all the links in the menu, leaving the selection on "<Main menu>" will result in top tab on the menu bar on your website. But selecting a parent within the existing menu will allow you to tree your site menu out for a clear organization your users can follow.
• Weight: This number controls the sort within the menu system.  This is often better controlled within the menu interface itself.

Scheduling options allows you to choose a time for a piece of content to be automatically published (made public) or unpublished (remove from public access).  You can either use the text format to enter a date or time, or in the date field the calendar icon will bring up a calendar date-picker, and the clock icon in the time field will bring up a timepicker.

Scheduled publishing is accomplished using a system within the server called "cron", basically each time the website if visited the site looks if there are scheduled jobs to execute.  It may be important to understand is that your scheduled time is when the job will be scheduled and not necessarily exactly when it will happen.

As noted above the website automatically generates an address for your page based on its position in the menu (OR in the case of content types such as events or news, that are not individually added to the menu, based on an internal set of rules). This generated address is called an "Alias".  This box allows you to overrule the system and set a custom URL for a page on your website.  We recommend using this sparingly.