We hope you like your new Drupal site. Jeremy Tirrell and I have tried to tailor this installation so that it suits instructor needs across a wide range of courses. We know that you'll want to customize it to your liking, so you can get started right away.

First, go to the DrupalEd Installation Guide. The Guide will first walk you through the process of changing your username, password, and email address. The Guide walks you through that. Then you can have at it.

Have a great semester!

Dave Blakesley
Director of Professional Writing
Purdue

Drupal, at its base installation, is a blank slate, a content management system that can be used to create a large variety of different websites. This installation is preconfigured for creating a community site suitable for the online writing classroom, a highly configurable platform that better facilitiates community interaction and collaboration than is otherwise possible with proprietary course management systems (e.g., WebCT). Educators will find that this distribution eliminates 95% of the work involved in setting up a Drupal site for a writing class.

It is not possible within the scope of this text to explain all Drupal configurations, modules, and features. Instead, the DrupalEd Site Configuration Guide is intended as a getting started FAQ that will guide you through some basic issues and answer some specific configuration questions. As you become more comfortable with Drupal, it is certainly worthwhile to learn more -- so that you can take advantage of the flexibility and wide range of configuration options and additional features.

For much more detailed information on Drupal configuration and usage, consult the Drupal modules and features section on drupal.org. Also be sure to read the help material available at the top of many of the administration pages.