Welcome! This guide describes how to get started using our Class website, which is a Drupal-powered website. The guide covers basic topics such as registering for an account, logging in, changing your account settings, and creating content.

Drupal is a content management system. Its goal is to help users compose and present website content such as articles, photos, and other content types. So everyone can help contribute to the site's content, and it's easy to contribute news, share pictures, and have discussions without having to send everything to one person who later publishes it. In other words, the webmaster is lazy and wants you to do all the work while he or she gets all the glory. Just kidding.

On our website, there are different "roles" that allow different levels of access to the site. Depending on your role, you may be allowed to contribute or edit content. People who have not registered at all can view some of the content on the site, including general Class News and other general information, but not all content, especially contact info and more personal info like family pictures and such.

Users who have registered (Drupal likes to call these "authenticated" users) can view pretty much everything, and can generally create content everywhere, and edit or delete their own content, but not other people's content. There are administrator roles, too, and they can edit other people's content.

Getting going involves these steps:

• register with the site
• log in by typing the user name and password you supplied in the registration step, and
• create content such as articles, stories and basic pages

This user guide will explain these steps and familiarize you with the basic information you need to use the site successfully.