Drupal for Designers

Chapter 1. Some Things to Remember About Working with Drupal

A Quick and Dirty Guide to DrupalSpeak

If you’re just starting off with Drupal, one of the hardest things to figure out is what people are saying when they discuss Drupal terms. What is a node? What do you mean by taxonomy? The following list is a quick and dirty guide to DrupalSpeak, which is my tongue-in-cheek way of describing Drupal’s unique jargon. It includes the most common terms you’ll find people using when they talk about Drupal.

Drupal core (or core Drupal)

The actual Drupal files that you downloaded from http://drupal.org. “Drupal core” is also used to talk about any functionality that is native to Drupal, as opposed to contributed modules.

Contrib

Modules or themes that you install after you install Drupal core.

Module

A plug-in that adds functionality to your site. Out of the box, Drupal provides a strong framework, but the point of the framework is to add functionality to it using modules. The website at http://drupal.org/project/modules has a list of all the modules that have been contributed by the Drupal community, sorted by most popular.

Theme

The templates that control the look and feel of a Drupal site. Drupal core comes with several themes that are very useful for site administration and prototyping; however, custom themes should always reside in your sites/all/themes folder and not in the core themes folder, located at themes among your core Drupal files.

Custom

Modules or themes that you create from scratch ...