Key Drupal Taxonomy: Part 1

Part 1:

When it comes to considering what is the best CMS for a website, most don’t know up from down or Drupal from WordPress.  At Mobomo, we consider ourselves Drupal experts and have guided many of our clients through a Drupal migration. Drupal is a content management system that is at the core of many websites.  Drupal defines itself as “an open source platform for building amazing digital experiences.” These simple Drupal terms, or taxonomies, make it sound easy, but it can, in fact, be very confusing. Listed below are some popular terms defined to help make the start of the migration process what it should be, simple and easy:

Key Terms:

1. Taxonomy – this is the classification system used by Drupal. This classification system is very similar to the Categories system you’ll find in WordPress.
2. Vocabularies – a category, or a collection of terms.
3. Terms – items that go into a vocabulary.
4. Tags – this is a generic way to classify your content and this is also the default setting when you first begin.
5. Menus – these refer both to the clickable navigation elements on a page, as well as to Drupal’s internal system for handling requests. When a request is sent to Drupal, the menu system uses the provided URL to determine what functions to call.  
   • There are 4 types:
     • Main
     • Management
     • Navigation
     • User
6. Theme – this refers to the look and feel of a site and it is determined by a combined collection of template files, in addition to configuration and asset files.  Drupal modules define themeable functions which can be overridden by the theme file.  The header, icons, and block layout are all contained within a theme
7. Content-Type – Every node, see below for definition, belongs to a content type.  This defines many different default settings for nodes of that type.  Content Types may have different fields, as well as modules may define their own content types.
8. Fields – These are elements that can be attached to a node or other Drupal entities. Fields typically have text, image, or terms.
9. Node – A piece of content in Drupal that has a title, an optional body, and perhaps other fields. Every node belongs to a particular content type (see above), and can be classified using the taxonomy system. Examples of nodes are polls and images.
10. Views – This refers to a module that allows you to click and configure the interface for running database queries. It can give the results in many formats.
11. Views Display – A views display is created inside of a view to show the objects fetched by the view in a variety of ways.
12. Module – A code that extends Drupal features and functionality. Drupal core comes with required modules, some of which are optional. A large number of “contrib,” or non-core, modules are listed in the project directory.
    • Core- has features that are available within Drupal by default
    • Custom- a module that is custom developed for a purpose that may not be available within the core system.  
    • Contributed- A module that is made available to others within the Drupal community after it was created as a custom module. There are more than 40,000 modules available today.

See Part 2 and Part 3 for more.  Any other questions? Check out Drupal.org!