So You’ve Got a Drupal Website… Now What? (Part Two: Learning the Lingo)

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.

One Response to “So You’ve Got a Drupal Website… Now What? (Part Two: Learning the Lingo)”

1. Elsewhere: So You’ve Got a Drupal Website… Now What? (Part Two: Learning the Lingo) : Ward on the Web Says:
   August 23rd, 2010 at 7:13 pm

   [...] just posted So You’ve Got a Drupal Website… Now What? (Part Two: Learning the Lingo) on ClickOptimize.com: In this series, I walk you through the basics of using your shiny new Drupal [...]

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.