Planning and Managing Drupal Projects

Chapter 1. Introduction

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, Taxonomy? The list below is a quick and dirty guide to DrupalSpeak™, which is a 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 Drupal.org. Drupal Core is also used to talk about any functionality that is native to Drupal.

Contrib

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

sites/all

A folder within your Drupal installation which contains all the files, including any contrib modules or themes, that are being used to customize your site.

Note

Any module, theme, or other customization that you create for your site should always reside in sites/all.

Node

A single piece of content. This could be a news item, event listing, simple page, blog entry — you name it. Anything in your site that has a heading and a bit of text is a node. Nodes can also have custom fields, which are useful for all sorts of things. Think of a Node the way you would a page on a website, or a record in an address book.

Field

Fields are one of the best things about creating content in Drupal. Using fields, you can attach images or files to content, create extra descriptors (like a date for an event, or a subheading for an article), or even reference other nodes. Drupal core (as of Drupal 7) allows for a number of field formats, but certain formats—such as images, file uploads, or video—require you to install contrib modules. There’s a list of contrib modules to extend fields’ power and usefulness in the Modules chapter.

Block

A piece of reusable content such as a sidebar menu, advertising banner, or callout box. Blocks can be created by a View (see Figure 1-1) or other contributed modules or created by hand in Drupal’s Blocks administration menu. The beauty of blocks is the flexibility of display—you can set up blocks to display based on any criteria that you set. This is especially helpful on home pages, for example, or for displaying a menu that’s only relevant to a specific section of a website.

Content type

The type of node you’re creating. One of Drupal’s best features is its support of multiple content types, each of which can be sorted out and displayed by any number of criteria. For example, in a basic corporate site, you might have the following content types: Blog Post, Basic Page, Event, News Item, Testimonial. Each of these content types can be sorted out and organized, using Views (see below), to create the Blog section, Events Page, News Room, etc. Best of all, your client can easily update the Events page simply by adding a new Event. Drupal will do all the work of sorting out the Events page and archiving old events.

Taxonomy

Content categories. At its most basic level, you can think of taxonomy as tags for content (like blog entries). The true power of taxonomy, however, lies in organizing large quantities of content by how an audience might search. For example, a recipe site can use taxonomy to organize recipes by several criteria—type of recipe (dessert, dinner, etc.), ingredients (as tags), and custom indicators (vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free, low carb, etc.). In building the site, you could then use Views to allow users to search by or filter recipes by any one (or several) of these criteria.

Users, Roles and Permissions

Users are exactly what they sound like: people or organizations that have registered on your site. The key to working with users lies in roles; Drupal allows you to create unique roles for anything that might need to happen on your site, and set permissions for each role depending on what that role might need to do. For example, if you’re creating a magazine-type site with multiple authors, you might want to create a role called “author” that has permission to access, create and edit their own content, but nobody else’s. You might also create a role called “editor” that has access to edit, modify and publish or unpublish the content of any of the authors.

Module

A plugin 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. Drupal.org/project/modules has a list of all the modules that have been contributed by the Drupal community, sorted by most popular.

View

An organized list of individual pieces of content that you create within the site, using the Views module. This allows you to display content related to taxonomy or content type, such as a “view” of blog posts versus a “view” of events.

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 in your Drupal files.

Template files (*.tpl.php)

Individual PHP files that Drupal uses for template generation. Most Drupal themes will have, at the very least, a tpl.php for blocks, nodes, and pages. Once you get the hang of working with tpl.phps, you can create custom templates for anything from a specific piece of content or specific content types to the output of a specific view.