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At the center of the Drupal concept is the "Node." A node is many things in the Drupal world, including a menu bar, a header or a forum entry. It is simply a term to identify a basic building block of a Drupal powered web site. These building blocks can contain other building blocks, and can in turn be contained within a building block. Seen this way, a Drupal web site is little more than a large Lego construction with each special piece snapping into place with other pieces to for a whole.

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.

Once you have created and published a web page, you will want to give users access to it. As with web pages everywhere, this is done primarily by creating links to the new document in the form of hyper-links. A hyper-link can either be embedded in the content of another page, or appear as an entry in a menu.

Go to the front page of the web-site in question. You should see a login dialog and under it a link titled "Request new password." Click this link to go to the new user creation page. If you don't see this link, it's possible that the administrator has hidden it on the front page. If this is the case, try navigating to the registration page manually. Enter the following URL in your browser's address bar: "http://www.example.com/user/password," replacing "example.com" with the actual address of the web-site.

Go to the front page of the Drupal-drive web-site in question. You may not be logged into the site when creating a new user. If you see the link "Log out," click it to log out of the web-site.