Last modified: March 18, 2025 at 8:09pm

Learn to create basic pages like an about page, or a landing page for a marketing campaign. Start by creating and previewing a draft page. When everything looks good, publish the page, and optionally add it to your site’s navigation. The basic page content type is available in all Drupal CMS sites without any other configuration required.

Goal

Publish a new Basic page.

Prerequisites

None. The Basic page content type is available by default in all Drupal CMS installations.

How to create and publish basic pages

You’ll use the Basic page content type to create the page, and optionally, the Layout Builder to customize the layout and add blocks to the page.

Create a draft page

A form for creating a basic page titled “About Us.” It includes fields for featured image (with a placeholder image), description, and content editor for body text

  1. Using the administrative toolbar, go to Create > Basic page (/node/add/page).
  2. Fill in the Create Basic page form with the details for your page.
    Title: Enter a title for the page.
    Description: Enter a short SEO-friendly description for the page. Used in search results and listing pages.
    Content: The primary content for the page. Can include formatted text, images, and other media.
  3. Optionally give the page a custom URL using the URL alias widget.
  4. Choose Save as: Draft and press the Save button to save a draft of your page.

Customize the URL of a page

Drupal CMS will generate automatic URLs for new pages based on the page’s title. If that doesn’t match your needs, you can customize it to be whatever you want.

  1. On the form for creating or editing a Basic page, locate the URL alias widget in the sidebar, and click to expand it.
     

    The “URL alias” section in Drupal’s page settings with “Generate automatic URL alias” toggled on. The “URL alias” field is disabled, indicating that the system will generate a URL alias automatically based on predefined patterns.

  2. By default, the Generate automatic URL alias feature will be toggled on. Click to toggle it off.

  3. In the URL alias field, enter the URL you would like to use for your page starting with a /. Example: /about.
     

    The “URL alias” section in Drupal’s page settings with “Generate automatic URL alias” toggled off. A custom alias “/about” is manually entered in the “URL alias” field, allowing the page to be accessed at this path.

  4. Press the Save button to save your changes.

Publish a page

After creating a draft of the page and previewing the content to ensure it looks correct, publish your page to share it with the world.

To publish a basic page:

  1. Using the administration toolbar, go to Content (/admin/content).
  2. Select the Moderated content tab. Filter the list to display Content type: Basic page and Moderation state: Draft.
  3. Find the page in the list and select the Edit button.

  4. In the sidebar, the Save as should be Draft. Set Save as to Published.
     

    The node form widget for changing the pages published status, the “Current state” label is set to “Draft” and the “Change to” options is set to “Published.”

  5. Select the Save button.

Add a menu item for a page

Pages can be added to your site navigation by creating a menu item. To add a menu item for a page:

  1. Using the administration toolbar, go to Content (/admin/content).
  2. Find the page in the list and select the Edit button.

  3. In the sidebar, open the Menu settings, and toggle the Provide a menu link option.
     

    A form with toggled-on “Provide a menu link” and pre-filled “Menu link title” as “About Us.” Other fields include “Description,” “Parent link” set to “Main navigation,” and “Weight” set to 0.

  4. Enter a Menu link title for the menu link.
  5. Choose a Parent link to nest your page under an existing item, or leave as <Main navigation> to create a top level menu item.
  6. Set a Weight to alter the order of menu items. Alternatively use the menu management UI under Structure > Menus to change menu item order via a drag and drop interface.
  7. Select the Save button to save your changes to the page.

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Add blocks to the content of a page

Sometimes a landing page needs to aggregate and display content from other places on the site. For example, an About us page might have a chunk of text about the company followed by a list of employee profiles. You can create layouts like this using the Basic page content type’s Layout options.

A Drupal layout editing interface for the “About Us” page. The page includes a “Save layout” button, options to discard changes or revert to defaults, and a notice that the layout is being edited. The main content area features the content of the page laid out into blocks and sections. Options to add blocks and sections are visible.

To change a page’s layout:

  1. Navigate to the page.
  2. Select the Layout tab at the top of the page.
  3. Use the Layout Builder UI to add sections and blocks to the page.
    Sections: Sections are containers into which we place blocks. They define the layout of the page, e.g. 2-columns.
    Blocks: A block is a content element placed into a section. Blocks in a layout can be either fields from the content type e.g. Title, or traditional Drupal blocks, e.g. A views module block listing person profiles
  4. Select the Save layout button at the top of the page to save your changes.

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Wrap-up

In this tutorial, we created a one-off page using the Basic page content type. First, we created a draft of the page, then once reviewed and ready to publish, we accessed the draft via the Content administration page’s Moderated content tab, and updated the page’s Save as status to Published. We also learned how to access the Layout configuration for a page in order to manage the page layout and add blocks.

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