Drupal® 7 Bible

Chapter 10. Content Management with Drupal

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Understanding the key concepts

• Understanding Drupal content types and fields

• Controlling how content is created

• Creating new content

• Managing existing content

The word content is deceptively simple. And the idea of managing it can mean many different things to different organizations. Dealing with the subtleties that lie in wait is why we have content management systems.

In this chapter, I lay the foundation for a solid understanding of how Drupal's content management internals work and how you can use the system to address your specific needs. I deal with the key concepts, look at managing content types, and then go into the details of daily content management tasks.

Understanding the Key Concepts

Drupal is a framework as much as it is a functional "out of the box" CMS. And before you can really learn to leverage the system's power, you must understand the basic ideas around managing Drupal content. The following concepts lie at Drupal's heart.

Content and nodes

Nearly all content items in your Drupal system are what in Drupal parlance we call nodes. With that said, we use the terms content items and nodes interchangeably in this book, as does the Drupal community. Don't be confused by this; nodes are content items and content. These are just different words that mean the same thing.

You do encounter other forms of data inside Drupal—users, comments, blocks, and taxonomy terms are examples, but strictly speaking these things are not ...