Allow Drupal Users to Manage Their Own Content

This week's tutorial is the first of a two-parter. We've had several students in our classes looking to build websites with multiple content authors ... blogs, newspapers, university sites and more. A common request is to improve Drupal's default handling of nodes.

This week we'll show you how to give each person their own control panel for their nodes. This will allow them to much more easily see, understand and update the content they've submitted. Without it they'd be reduced to searching and guessing their way through the site to find their content.

Next week we'll focus on how to create a workflow and allow nodes to pass through several approval steps before publication.

In order to give each person their own control we're going to use a module called "Workspace":

Installing Workspace to Your Drupal Site

• Step 1: Visit http://drupal.org/project/workspace to download the latest version of "Workspace".
• Step 2: Extract the files into a folders on your desktop. The folder will be called "workspace".
• Step 3: Login to your site's files via FTP and navigate to /sites/all/. If there isn't a folder called /modules/ here, create one.
• Step 4: Upload the "workspace" folder to /sites/all/modules/
• Step 5: Go to Administer >> Site building >> Modules and enable Workspace. You'll need to check only one box.
• Step 6: When your users login they'll see a link in the admin menu called "My Workspace". When they click on it they'll see a screen like this:

From this screen your users will be able to search for all their nodes, just as you search through them from Administer >> Content Management >> Content.