Getting started with Drupal Gardens
Here are some common Drupal terms that will help you follow this guide and get the most out of your site. Drupal Gardens help pages also show links from key terms to the Drupal Gardens Glossary.
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Content is the stuff you want to show your site visitors. Content items–called "nodes" in Drupal–are always of a given content type. A content type defines how content is collected and displayed. All content types share certain properties, they all have a title and most have a text body, for example. However, each can be customized to collect more or less information and behave in specific ways. Many Drupal Gardens features give you content types for specific purposes, like blog entries, FAQ items, media galleries, and so on. You can begin to post content on your site using the content types that came with your site, or you can customize the ones you have or create new content types.
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Pages in Drupal are content, not empty, structural frames to be filled with content. When you create content, it is a page with its own URL, and you can link to it in menus. You decide how and where it will appear on your site. It can be a stand-alone page like an "About us" page, it can also be a part of a dynamic page–a collection of content items displayed as a page at a different URL.
There is also a "Basic Page" content type that happens to be called "page", but it is simply a basic content type with a title and text body.
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Blocks are containers used to show extra information on one or more pages of your site. They are most commonly created by enabling a module (see “Module” below). For example, enabling the Comment module makes the "Recent comments" block available. You can also make your own custom blocks containing images and text, and dynamic blocks that change as your site changes. Learn more on the Blocks and regions help page.
Since blocks' contents, display position (see "Regions" below) and page placement can be modified, blocks are the primary method of visually organizing your site’s content.
The marked parts of this page are blocks:
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Regions are pre-defined areas of your site's pages where content can be placed. They include header, footer, content and sidebar regions. When working with blocks, you would typically place content into a block, then place the block into a region on the Blocks page. Any block can be displayed in any region on one or more pages of your site.
Learn more on the Blocks and regions help page.
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Menus let your site visitors navigate to pages on your site. All content and dynamic pages you create on your site have URLs that you can add to any menu. Drupal menus are displayed as blocks, meaning you can control the region and pages where they appear just like any other block. You can add any number of menus to your site.
Here's an example of using multiple menus on a Drupal site:
- Main menu
- User menu
- Sub-menu for specific area of site
- Footer menu
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Modules in Drupal add functionality to your site like blogging, creating media galleries, forums, and so on. Drupal Gardens comes with a selection of pre-installed modules. Some modules make new blocks, menu items, and permissions available when they are enabled. You can enable and disable them at Modules > List:
