Knowledgebase
How to publish articles and other content types in Drupal
To post content on your Drupal site, log in to the administrator panel of your Drupal application and either click on the Add content link in the Navigation block, or click on the Content tab in the top navigation bar and on the page that opens click on the Add content button. Both ways will lead you to the Add content page of the admin panel. There you have to choose a content type. Drupal comes preconfigured with an Article content type and a Basic page content type. The settings for both are similar but there are some differences. Additional content types are added when you enable some of the modules that come with every Drupal installation package (e.g. Blog, Book, Forum, Poll). After you click on the content type that you want to use, you'll see the settings that you have to configure before you publish the content.
Type the title and optionally the tags in the corresponding fields. Under them is the text area for the body of the content. Type or copy and paste there the text that you want to publish. The article content type is first displayed on the frontend in a preview form with a summary. The user can then read the complete article by clicking on its name or on the Read more link. The summary is trimmed automatically using the beginning of your article, and in accordance with the settings for the content type (e.g. 600 characters by default for the article content type). If you want to explicitly type a summary click on the Edit summary link and a new text area for the summary will appear. In this case it can be longer or shorter than the automatically cut summary.
From the global settings for the particular content type it's possible to change the length of the automatically trimmed summary, or to disable it altogether and display the full content. You can check out the respective articles in our knowledge base to learn how to do these things.
Under the text area for the body, depending on the content type there might be an option which you can use to upload an image. At the bottom of the page there are several sections with options: Menu settings, Revision information, URL path settings, etc. They are preconfigured according to the default settings for the particular content type. Changing them will affect only the content item that you're about to publish (or edit). You can use these options to provide a menu link to the content item, to specify a friendly URL, to disable/enable user comments, to stick the content item at the top of the homepage, etc. After you're done with the settings don't forget to click on the Save button.
For some more information and details you can also read the tutorial on publishing content in Drupal.