Drupal Glossary

These definitions are designed for end users of Drupal and people exploring the Drupal platform for a project. Denver DataMan is a member of the Drupal Association and was a Silver Sponsor of the Drupal Camp Colorado 2010.

Content Type

A construct for determining specific attributes about content formatting, fields and other settings. A blog post (node) will have different fields and attributes than a directory listing and will have different content type.

Drupal

A Content Management System (CMS) and web application framework that provides a powerful platform for managing web based content and creating applications for the Internet. You can find out more about Drupal on the Drupal.org website.

Drupal Core

The modules that ship with Drupal as part of what you download when you first start using Drupal. Drupal core includes modules for nodes, search, comments, themes and others. Drupal Core is also responsible for the overall function of Drupal.

Fields

Fields are added to content types to provide users of the site the ability to enter specific content for each type of content.

In Drupal 6.0 The CCK module is used for fields. In Drupal 7 this is part of Drupal core.

Module

Modules are components in Drupal that are used to accomplish specific tasks. There are Drupal modules for ecommerce, modules for forms, modules for connecting your site to Google Analytics and many others.

Node

A piece of content on a Drupal site. Every node has a unique ID.

Node Status: Promoted

Is a node shown on the default front page for Drupal.

Node Status: Published

Nodes that are published can be seen by any user. A node that is not published can only be seen by users with permission to administer nodes.

Node Status: Sticky

Nodes can be shown on the top of lists regardless of other sorting if they are labeled as sticky. Sticky nodes are often shown with different formatting by some themes.