Filed under: Uncategorized
In this series, I walk you through the basics of using your shiny new Drupal website. In part one, I explained what Drupal is and why it’s awesome. We’ll get into working with Drupal in the next section. Before we can walk the Drupal walk, however, we need to learn to talk the Drupal talk.
I have to learn a whole new language?
Not at all. Just a few terms. Drupal’s got its own parlance, a dialect, if you will. Some of it make sense; some if it takes some getting used to. If you learn it before diving in, though, you’ll have a much easier time navigating the maze and understanding how things work. Here are some terms to know:
- Node
- A node is a piece of content. It could be a page or a product, a blog post or a forum topic, or anything else you might think up. You can configure your site to have many different kinds of node types, and many modules creates new node types for you, but they’re all fundamentally the same: Discrete pages of content.
- Block
- If a node is the main course, blocks are the side dishes and appetizers. These appear around your content, often in sidebars, headers, or footers, and feature snippets of useful or interesting information. They may be menus, calendars, random pictures of your house cat Snuffles, you name it.
- Region
- Regions are places that blocks can live, such as the sidebar or header. These are defined by your…
- Theme
- A theme is a site design. Once themes are installed, they can be switched out with the click of a button without affecting the content.
- Module
- “I know kung fu.” Modules are packages of extended functionality for Drupal. For example, Drupal does not support ecommerce out of the box, but the Ubercart collection of modules allows it to do so. If you ever need your site to do something it couldn’t do before, you probably need a module.
- Taxonomy
- The taxonomy system controls how content on your site is categorized and tagged. Any time you need to organize products into a catalog, tag a blog post, or classify a suborder of nematode, you’ll use the taxonomy system to do it.
- Vocabulary
- A vocabulary is a set of taxonomy terms. In the previous example, we might use Catalog, Blog Tags, and Orders of Nematode as our vocabularies. Each vocabulary is configured separately and can describe any number of content types. You can even have more than one vocabulary for a content type (e.g., Catalog and Designer for products).
- Term
- Let’s ignore the irony of defining the term “term” for a moment. In Drupal, a term is a specific taxonomy descriptor that exists within a vocabulary. Extending the examples above, Dazy Dukes, Articles, and Mesorhabditis (a genus of nematode that exhibits an unusual form of parthenogenesis; see, you learned something today) might be some of the terms in each of our vocabularies.
- User
- Anyone using the site is a user. Users not logged in are called anonymous users. Users who are logged in are called authenticated users.
- Role
- Roles are groups of tasks and privileges given to specific users. For example, you might have a Site Administrator role. Any user with this role might then have the permission to modify the site as he or she sees fit. Any user may be assigned any number of roles.
- Permission
- A permission is a specific task or privilege a user is allowed to perform by virtue of their role(s) on the site. For example, a user with the Forum Moderator role might have the “administer forums” permission. Permissions are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users.
- User #1
- The very first user account on a Drupal site, created when the site is set up, is a special account called User #1. User #1 automatically has every permission, regardless of role. This way, there’s always a user on the site who can access anything that might need to be accessed.
- WYSIWYG
- What You See Is What You Get. This describes text areas on a Drupal site that have been enabled to act like word processors. If you make text bold in a WYSIWYG editor, it will appear as bold within the editor as well as on the page.
Note that this is only a partial list. Check out the Drupal website for a more complete (and technical) list of Drupal terminology.
My head hurts. The room is spinning.
Sit down. Take a breather. It’s a lot to take in, I know, but that’s it for now. So just rest, assimilate, and come back for the next installment on how to manage content in Drupal.
Filed under: Uncategorized
It’s shiny. It’s new. And it’s totally mind-boggling how much you can do with it. The only trouble is, you have no idea where to start. In this series, I’ll walk you through all the useful bits and bobs in your new Drupal site, how to use them, and all of the situationally useful extra stuff you can safely ignore 99% of the time.
But before we dive into that, let’s start with the basics.
“Drupal”? What in the world is a “Drupal”?
Yes, the name sounds silly. Apparently, it derives from the Dutch word for “drop”, which was the original name picked after “dorp” (the Dutch word for “village”) was unavailable as a domain. Yeah, I know; it doesn’t make the name any less silly. Just bear with me on this.
It isn’t the name that matters. It’s what Drupal does. Drupal is a full-featured content management system, or CMS, which is just a fancy way of saying it’s a platform for building large, dynamic websites that anyone (even mere mortals who lack vast computer mojo) can manage. You can create new content, manage user accounts, change out menu items, and do all sorts of other neat things without ever having to leave the comfort of the Drupal administration panel or mess with a lick of code.
Okay, sounds neat. But aren’t there a bunch of CMS’s out there? What makes Drupal so special?
It’s true. If you’re shopping around for a CMS, you have a lot of good options to pick from. And some of them are better than Drupal in some ways. WordPress, for example, is the best blogging CMS out there, and beats Drupal in the usability department hands down (sorry, Drupal, but it’s true). For smaller, simpler websites or straight blogs, WordPress is probably a better choice.
That’s just to say Drupal isn’t the only fish in the CMS sea, and that it isn’t the best fit for every website. It is, however, one of the biggest, best, and most badass. It’s like the great white of CMS’s. Here’s why:
- It’s feature-rich. Straight out of the box, Drupal handles a lot of the basic functionality any good website needs, like user management, version control, error logging, and site search. It does a great job of the mundane stuff; all you have to do is worry about customizing the pieces that make your site special.
- It’s modular. If there’s anything Drupal doesn’t do out of the box, 95% of the time, somebody’s built a module that handles it. Think of modules as packages of extra functionality. You upload them to your website, enable them in Drupal, and now Drupal knows how to do something brand new, like build webforms, track pages with Google Analytics, or let users send private messages to one another.
- It’s themeable. Okay, “themeable” isn’t necessarily a real word (or so my word processor is telling me). The idea is, in Drupal, design and content are separate. If you want to completely change the look of your site, all you have to do is modify the theme; the content stays right where it is. This makes your life easier and your site more agile
if changes ever need to be made when changes inevitably need to be made.
- It’s open source. Chances are you’ve heard the term but never really had a chance to appreciate what it means. Open source basically means that a piece of software is free for anyone to use and customize (i.e., the “source” code is “open” to the public). This means Drupal is free to download, install, and upgrade, keeping development and maintenance costs down. It also means that there’s a worldwide community of unpaid enthusiasts constantly bug-checking and extending upon Drupal. That’s where all those nifty modules come from. Did I mention that most of those are free, too?
- It’s got a fantastic ecommerce engine: Ubercart. As if it didn’t already do a lot, Drupal is a terrific ecommerce platform when paired with Ubercart. You can make catalogs, manage products, process orders… the whole shebang. Like Drupal itself, it’s hard to list all of the things Ubercart does right out of the box.
Drupal sounds too good to be true. What’s the catch?
Like I said before, Drupal’s great, but it’s not the end-all, be-all. For all of its versatility, the backend can take some getting used to. In fact, the word “labyrinthine” comes to mind. It isn’t that you can’t do a lot with it; it’s that it isn’t always clear how to get in, get the job done, and get out, all while avoiding the minotaur.
Don’t worry, though; that’s what the rest of this series is for. Now that you know what it is and why it’s awesome, I’ll walk you through how to use it. Next up, learning to speak the Drupal lingo.
Posted on August 23rd, 2010 by Stephen
1 Comment »