Help - Beyond the Basics

Drupal is designed to support many different types of web sites. Here at AIS Solutions Group, we have chosen it to power our primary customer-facing web portal because of its flexibility, web standards compliance, and utility. Many changes to a Drupal site's functionality, appearance, and modes of interaction are easy to make via Drupal's configuration and extension mechanisms, and thus:

* Drupal is highly configurable. The administrator of a site can enable different capabilities and change many settings that affect the look and functionality of a site.

* Drupal has a system of privileges that makes it possible to create different user roles - for instance, member, staff, partner. Each type of user can see and do different things on the site.

* Drupal is designed to be easily extended through modules. A module is just a fancy term for additional software you can activate or "plug in" to your web site to provide extra features and functions. For example, you might activate the poll module to let users easily create web-based polls. Some modules, called "core" modules, come pre-packaged with every Drupal installation. Third party modules, called "contributed" modules, can be downloaded separately from the Drupal website and installed on your server.

* The look and feel of a Drupal site can be changed through different "themes". As with modules, there are both core and contributed themes.

Hence, what you see on a particular Drupal site, and what you can do there, depends to a high degree on what the site administrator(s) have chosen to present. If you require more in-depth information about changing the way in which information is presented or how its appearance may be configured, please see the Administrator's guide at http://drupal.org/handbook and the Drupal forums.

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