This is a small introduction into Drupal and the terminology it uses. If you need some more details then see my other tutorials at EDUFIRE or contact me through one of the links listed at the end of the tutorial.

HISTORY

To start with, let me explain some of the history of Drupal.

Drupal was started by a student at the University of Antwerp as a way for his roommates to communicate with each other and share their ADSL line. It worked well enough that he, Dries Buytaert, released it on the web for others to use. It became very popular as a starting point for some very powerful web sites.

It got its funny name when it was named 'dorp' or a village in Dutch, but he made a typo when registering the domain name so it became 'drop.org'. Then as things grew, the community started looking for more and the Dutch word for a dropplet or druppel was Americanized to Drupal.

Now it is being used by several large international corporations like Sony and Warner Brothers, newspapers like Onion or the NY examiner, and governments like the UN and the U.S.

It is what is called a CMS or Content Management System. A CMS is a web application, which is a collection of programs that run on the web, that lets you create and manage content of a web site. That content could be a staff list, a message from your CEO, or a catalog of services you offer.

The idea is that you don't have to worry about all the little technical details behind a site whenever something changes. Instead of having someone who knows HTML create a new page and then waiting for the webmaster to change it online, all you do with Drupal is have someone who knows how to use a keyboard and a mouse make the changes. It is just like a program on your desktop computer.

Drupal takes care of the details of the creating the content, editing it, and presenting it in a way you and your customers find useful which also allows you to worry about your business.

Terminology

Let's start with some basic words used.

But first I want to cover what 'content', a 'node', and a 'content type' is. They are all at the center of what Drupal is and you need to understand both to understand Drupal. By content we mean anything that comes from a user or administrator of the web site besides the underlying infra-structure (HTML or the PHP that creates it). It could be the blurb in your 'about us' page, a list of your staff, one of your users blog entries, or a picture gallery.

A node is one of the rather nerdy terms to describe a single piece of content. Since what a piece of content is was just covered I won't get into what a node is.

A content type is just that ... a type of content. You'll see different kinds of nodes categorized by how they are used. For example; as far as the computer goes there is no difference between a blog entry and a forum entry, but they are used differently so it makes sense to name them differently. They might have different permissions or they might display in a different manner. For example; while you want your users to change their blogs and the like there are pages you don't want them to change, like the 'about us' blurb.

BLOCK One of the first things that strike you about a well organized web site is that common items are bunched together on the screen so you can find what you want. It might be a list of articles or a teaser view of the first paragraph of the most popular articles. That is the idea behind a "block". It is just a block of information that you will later decide where it should go like the sidebar on the left of the screen, the sidebar on the right of the screen, or in the header. Each page layout has there own places of putting things but these are the most common.

You can decide what your visitors will see and what is important for your goals. You might want to display a different menu for employees than for someone off the street.

The little programs are called "widgets" in many popular web-sites. The little widgets include things that will allow you want your visitors to be able to do like posting to other social networking sites like 'digg this' or to download a printable version of the content.

BLOG: A 'blog' is like a small discussion that is started by you. You write a piece and others comment on that or on other comments. A blog is a major part of the Internet today and was originally named after online journals or logs-- a weB LOG. This can easily be used for the PR value of a CEO's message to your customers. You can use it to talk about your new products or upcoming corporate changes and let them ask questions before they get frustrated and start down-talking you to others.

BOOK: A 'book' is really a very well organized group of text nodes. They are organized in Sections and Chapters while blogs generally are organized by time. You could use if for something like a technical or users manual. There are even some extensions to allow users to download a book as a PDF, saving you time and effort.

CONTENT TYPE: The collection itself is organized by the type of content which is officially known as a 'content type'. Think of how a newspaper is organized. Its article are listed in sections like local news, national news, sports, and entertainment. While there are many ways to do this in Drupal, one way would be to use different content types.

The several content types that are already built into Drupal include a page, a story, a book, a forum, and a blog. You can add your own custom content types later. I'll cover how to do that in other tutorials.

Some of those content types start to blend together so the difference really is how you use it. Technically the difference is whether the node shows up on the front page of your site or not and whether or not visitors can leave their comments about it. These are all things that can be changed but here are some basic guidelines.

CREATE CONTENT This is the menu item where you create content. It is found under the 'navigation' sub-title. In a strictly text content type all you have to do is type in a title and the node's body. But with a photo gallery you might have to enter the photo that will be used as a thumbnail, the photos, and its description.

FORUM A 'forum' is a conversation without being started by one person. This allows for your customers to ask questions to your customer service department. Or they can work things out between each other and can save your customer service department time handling common situations so they can focus on the ones that might hurt you later as they grow bigger. It is almost like a 'letter to the editor' section in a newspaper or magazine.

INPUT FILTERS This is Drupals way of protecting your site from certain hacker attacks. It only displays content that is as powerful as the writer is allowed to show. The administrator can make changes to a persons permissions and a very powerful RBAC (role based access control) scheme can be created.

MENU I assume everybody who is reading this already knows what a menu is and how it is used. But there are a few concepts that are slightly different in Drupal: a primary menu, secondary menu, and tabs.

 

 

 

MODULE A module is a special piece of business logic that you add to your site. For example, you might need to keep track of department meetings and which room they are assigned to. That isn't in a vanilla version of Drupal, but there is a module out there to do just that. If you use Mozilla's browser Firefox then they use the same concept except they call them "extensions".

Like a theme, there are some already in Drupal, there are thousands available for free at Drupal's site. Or you can write a custom module yourself. Doing so requires knowledge of the language PHP and Drupal's API. While it is not undoable, it has a very steep learning curve and is where Drupal gets its reputation as being difficult to use.

PAGE: A 'page' is used mostly for administrative purposes. For those of you who know HTML, think of it as a static HTML page. It works like the publishers page in a magazine. It is always there, rarely changes, it shows up in a certain place and not on the cover (front page), and readers can't comment on it. You might want to use this for a company description.

PRIMARY MENU These are menu items that are of primary importance. They usually are displayed at the top since this is where your visitors will look when it is time to navigate somewhere else. These are links like your CEO's message of the month for example.

PROMOTE TO FRONT PAGE: This means that this node will be displayed on the site's front page. In the administrative page you can decide what to show on the front page. The default is to show every thing that has been “promoted”. When a piece of content is not promoted, or has be de-moted, the piece doesn't disappear, it just doesn't show on the front page. This way you can get the most important pieces to show on the front page. In some sites that means the most popular.

PUBLISHED: Simply put, 'Published' just means that the piece is ready to be shown to users other than the one that created it. By default the way to do that is to go down to the “publishing options' and remove the check from 'published'. The node will disappear from all lists of nodes, but it is not deleted. Only people who can see the content are those who have sufficient permissions. By default that is the node's owner and the administrator. This is helpful when you need to temporarily take a piece off line so that you can revise it and put it back on later.

REGIONS I mentioned earlier that a theme was laid out in a consistent manner. It does this by dividing the screen into sections like left bar, right bar, header, footer, and body. Then you choose where you want blocks to show up. For example; a newsletter lay-out that has two or three columns of body text in addition to the small menus on the side. This varies somewhat from theme to theme so if you need the menu bar on the right to be there all the time then look for it in the theme you are choosing.

SECONDARY MENU items are menu items of "secondary" importance. They are usually regulated to the line below primary links or to the bottom completely. Some examples of these are 'about us' or information about the privacy controls on you site.

STORY:t is only a text node that can be changed by your staff fairly easily, people can leave their comments, and by default it will show-up on your front page. A 'story' should, in my opinion, be called an 'article'. I

 

TABS These are the special actions you can take on each node depending on your permissions. If you have the right permissions to edit the node you are at you will see two tabs just above the node's title, view and edit.

TAXONOMY One of the most powerful features in Drupal is the ability to categorize content so that viewers can see just what they want to see without being confused by all the rest. We all suffer from "information overload" now days, your customers aren't any different. Categorizing information in an intuitive manner is one way to not overwhelm your visitors. They are more likely to act on something when the thought is still fresh in their mind. Have you every gone to a site to buy something and given up after wading thorough tons of menus?

The site Flikr does this with something they call tags. When a visitor looks at a picture of flowers they can get a list of all pictures under the tag "flower" by pressing the flag “flower”. In Drupal you have the same thing but it goes by the term “taxonomy” which is based on the Greek terms for categorization. Greek τάξις, taxis ('order', 'arrangement') and νόμος, nomos ('law' or 'science'). The individual words are called 'term's and a group of words are call 'vocabularies'.

THEME Another characteristic of a useful web site is consistency in how things are portrayed. No matter where the visitor goes, the menus are basically the same and they don't have to learn how to use each page separately. In most modern web-sites, this consistency comes from what is called a theme. There are several themes built into Drupal, thousands are available for free, or you can write your own which are details I won't cover here.

When you use a theme you get to choose some of the basic components of the screen like a graphic logo (the smiling dropplet with infinity eyes), the sites name ('Drupal'), and the one line slogan ('community plumbing').

There are also choices about a mission statement, a favicon, whether a search box should be used, and where each block should be displayed (see the section titled regions).

directory structure

/modules/

The core modules - do not put contributed or custom modules here!

/sites/

/all

contributed and custom modules

contributed and custom themes

/default

settings.php

/themes

The core themes - do not put contributed or custom themes here!

Dave Keays, Drupal tutor and developer

LINKS

http://Edufire.com (where I tutor)
dave@rdksoftware.com (my email)
Drupal.org (Drupal's home)
LADrupal.org (a Drupal Users Group in Los Angeles California)
themegarden.org (a collection of themes for Drupal)