Building a Drupal site from scratch - part 3 - Better administration

| Drupal Development | 7 seen

Recently I started a tutorial series - How to build a Drupal site from scratch. In part 1 I'm talking about planing a site. In part 2, I'm showing how to make a subtheme from Bootstrap theme

Before digging deeper in site customization, I'm willing to show how to tune a little bit up Drupal administrative tasks. By default (out of box) Drupal is not very user friendly for making admin related tasks. But it can be easily solved by adding few (actually just one module)

Administration menu:

From creators:

Provides a theme-independent administration interface (aka. navigation, back-end). It's a helper for novice users coming from other CMS, a time-saver for site administrators, and useful for developers and site builders.

Administrative links are displayed in a CSS/JS-based menu at the top on all pages of your site. It not only contains regular menu items — tasks and actions are also included, enabling fast access to any administrative resource your Drupal site provides.

Note, to make Drupal Admin_menu to work, you'll have your Drupal to be higher verion than 7.10.. I accidentaly installed Drupal 7.10 from a script, so I'll need to upgrade my Drupal version to newest.
 
Now your site haves sticky (fixed) menu, for admin, when logged in. 
 
 
When admin menu has been setup, the next thing I like to change, is admin theme.
 
By default Drupal will use active theme for administrative tasks as well, depending on your theme, it might work, or not work so great (It will work in any case, just the feel might be not so good)
 
Changing Drupal admin theme:
 
Go to admin/appearance, scroll down till Administration theme section, and check box next to Use the administration theme when editing or creating content. I prefer to use theme Seven for Drupal admin tasks, depending of your taste, you can choose Seven, or download some other theme from Drupal or even create your own. Drupal Seven theme already cames with Drupal installation, and you dont need anything to download.
 
 
Great, we are ready to continue our Drupal building site from scratch tutorial :)

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