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Supplying information to your users is of course a basic and important task for your web site. To provide this information, Drupal provides two default content-types, the "Page" and the "Story." There is little difference between the two; the distinction is maintained primarily to allow a basic categorization of different content for organizing the site. The examples in this article refer to the "Page" content type.

In the primary navigation menu there should be a menu entry titled "Create content." (If you don't see it, it's because you are not logged in, or your account does not have the authority to create content.) Clicking on the menu entry brings a list of the available content types that you can create. Click the "Page" entry; this will present you with an entry form for creating the new page. Specifically, you will see at least two entry fields—"Title" and "Body." Enter a title appropriate to the current page into the "Title" field. This text will appear at the top of the page and in the HTML header's title.

The body is where you enter the actual information of the page. This can be as long and complex as you like, and depending on the input format you use, can consist merely of simple text input, more complex HTML or Wiki data, or even program code. By default, the text you enter will look similar to the user as you see it typed in. For instance, typing two paragraphs separated by a blank line will appear as two paragraphs to the end user. Moreover, any web page or e-mail addresses are automatically turned into hyper links in the final document.

Certain basic HTML tags are recognized as well. To italicize text, surround it with a <em> and </em>; to print text in bold text, surround it with <strong> and </strong>. To find out more about formatting options, see the recipe You want to format content other than with simple HTML.

To see how the page is progressing, click the "Preview" button on the bottom of the screen. Once you are happy with the page's title and and content, click "Submit" to save the new page. When saving, you may specify one or more attributes of the new page. To see what attributes are available, click the "Publishing options" link above the "Preview" and "Submit" buttons. Here you can select one or more options—selecting "Published" means that the page is immediately viewable by everyone. Selecting "Promoted to front page" indicates that this page should appear first for users visiting the site; if more than one page has this attribute, all will be listed in order. Other attributes available are described elsewhere.

Note that simply publishing a new page does not automatically make it accessible to the end user (unless it has been promoted to the front page). To make it availabe, you either need to create a link to the page or create a menu entry to it.