Getting your feet wet: Start administering your site

We have had a first look at the Control Panel screen layout and the main backend toolbars. You're probably dying to try out how the thing actually works! I'll test your patience just a little more. First, we'll make some more sense of the Control Panel and find out what you really need to know to get started on this impressive tool box. After all, its main menu bar consists of seven menu options with more than 40 submenu items. That's a wealth of CMS power—but it's also quite daunting.

We won't go into all of the menu items and their capabilities here; rather, you'll learn how to use the important menu options as you go along building your site in the next chapters. For now, let's go ahead and see what the primary functions are.

Three types of backend actions

Roughly, the seven options in the Control Panel menu bar consist of three clusters. Some you'll use on a daily basis, some you'll only have to deploy every now and then. In the following diagram you can see what these three groups are. In the rest of this chapter, we'll have a closer look at them not in the order they appear on the menu bar, but in order of their relevance in your day-to-day content management activities.

Let's try out an example of each of these three types of content and site management actions:

• Content actions example: Publishing actual content
• Extension actions example: Working with extensions or, rearranging modules
• Admin actions example: Changing site settings