Key Drupal Taxonomy: Part 3

Part 3: The Final Installment

This is the final installment of Drupal Taxonomy that we feel is important for one unfamiliar with Drupal to know! At this point, hopefully, you understand some of the key language that is regularly used in the Drupal Community.  For reference, our first two blogs, Part 1 and Part 2, should provide you any background you may not already have.  Mobomo is the team that is behind NASA, the solar eclipse with NASA, the USGS store, and NOAA Fisheries, all of which are Drupal sites.  Similar to these organizations, Drupal is the CMS system for you if your needs are more complex, you are developing an e-commerce portal, or if you have a large amount of content to maintain.  If you have a Drupal project in the works or are about to migrate versions or CMS systems, Mobomo has some of the best and brightest Drupal developers in the DC area.

Key Terms:

1. Permissions – This is a tool for controlling access to content creation, modification, and site administration at the application level.
   1. Administrators can assign permissions to roles, then assign users to these roles.
   2. The first user receives all permissions.
2. Template – This refers to a file to express presentation
   1.  These are mostly written with a markup language that has variables representing data provided to the template.
3. Theme Engine – This is a set of scripts that interprets code and makes theming a site easier. These scripts take the dynamically generated content and output it to HTML.
   1. The default theme engine is PHPTemplate
4. Theme Hook – This is an identifier used by the calls to the theme() function to delegate rendering to a theme function or theme template.  Modules which extend Drupal may declare their own theme hooks to allow editors to control the markup of that module in their theme.
5. Trigger – These typically result from a characteristic change in an entity maintained by a module.
   1. Types:
      1. Deleting content
      2. Adding a comment that a user has logged in
      3. Adding a term
6. Triage – A new issue is assigned a priority based on its severity, frequency, risk, and other predetermined factors.
7. Zebra Striping – This refers to the to the alternating colors between rows of data. It is most common for rows of data to alternate background colors between white and gray.
8. Testbot – A continuous integration service for testing patches submitted to project issues on Drupal.org.
9. Roles – A name for a group of users, to whom you can collectively assign permissions. There are two predetermined, locked roles for every new Drupal installation:
   1. Authenticated User – anyone with an account on the site.
   2. Anonymous User – those who haven’t yet created accounts or are not logged in.
   3. Additional roles can be added and users can belong to multiple roles.
10. Path – This is the final portion of the URL that refers to a specific function or a piece of content.

Please reference Drupal.org for more information!