Glossary

The look and feel of the pages you see when administering your website, e.g. when you click link in the administration menu bar like 'Content', 'Configuration', 'Modules', 'Structure' and so on. The default administration theme in Drupal Gardens, called 'Seven', is optimized to help you administer your site.

Set the administration theme at 'Configuration > Administration theme and overlay' on your Drupal Gardens site.

Anyone who views your site without being logged in is considered anonymous. Everything anonymous visitors can see and do on your site is determined by the permissions you give the Anonymous user role. You should refrain from giving the Anonymous user role sensitive administrative permissions like 'Administer all content.'

An authenticated user is a visitor to your site who has logged in. Every user who has logged in is assigned the 'Authenticated' user role, at a minimum. What logged in users can see and do on your site is determined by the permissions you give the Authenticated user role, unless users have additional roles assigned to them, such as Administrator.

A block is a container that displays information in any region of your site theme. Blocks are generally placed around the main content area as headers, footers, and sidebar-elements. Blocks may be menus, contain static content (you can create your own custom blocks containing text, HTML and/or images) or dynamic content generated by many modules or features (in Drupal gardens, every media gallery creates a preview block for itself, Simple Views can also be set to create blocks).

Configure blocks and their behavior on your site at Structure > Blocks. You can specify when and where blocks appear on your site depending on user, URL, and more.

Standard Drupal blocks include: User login, Navigation, Recent comments, and the 'Who's new?' block.

Some modules and features make new blocks available when they are enabled.

Content organized into a "book" on your site is like the chapters, sections, subsections and pages in a book. Technically, a book in Drupal is a set of sequentially ordered content arranged in a hierarchical structure that can include multiple levels of parents and children. On your Drupal Gardens site, books are good for compiling handbooks, course material and much more. Books have built in navigation (previous/next page and up to parent level) and a print view by default. To add books to your site, enable the Book module.

Example: the Drupal Gardens help pages are organized in a large Drupal book.

Breadcrumbs are a navigation aid - the words, usually displayed at the top of the content area - showing a site visitor where they currently are in the structure of your site and how to get home again. They are generated by the menu structure of your site.

Example: The breadcrumbs displayed to a visitor looking at a gallery on your Drupal Gardens site might be 'Home >> Galleries'. Both of the words are links: 'Home' links to your site's front page; 'Galleries' links to the main galleries page.

A child item is one that is a sub-item to another item, its 'parent'.

In Drupal Gardens nodes in books, taxonomy terms, and menu items can be parents and children.

In menus, the children may be displayed in drop-downs when a menu is displayed in the 'Navigation' region, or as indented list items if the menu is displayed in another region.

If you chose the Drupal Gardens 'Comments' feature or have enabled the Comment module, you can allow site visitors to comment on nodes on your site.

Comments are usually displayed on the same pages as the node they refer to, but are not nodes themselves.

Content is the information you present to your users on your website. The information stored in your Drupal Gardens website that determines how it functions (and not, per se, presented to users) is referred to as configuration information, not content.

Drupal's fundamental unit of content is the node, to create, edit and manage your site's nodes, click 'Content' in the administrative menu.

Drupal also has content that is not contained in nodes: comments, custom blocks, headers, footers, and RSS feed items are also content, but are managed elsewhere in the administrative interface.

The look and feel of your website (the theme) is not considered content. It is the presentation of your content and can be easily changed while keeping all of your content.

Content types allow you to create nodes that exactly suit the kind of content you are creating on your site, whether a page, story, forum topic, poll, image, restaurant, record album, or anything else. All Drupal nodes have a title and a body, but this isn't always enough to differentiate between different kinds of content. To define specific characteristics of different kinds of content, you can create new content types with the 'fields' needed to describe it (fields can hold many kinds of information, including text, numerical, media, and many more). You can also add fields to existing content types.

Defining your content by content type also gives you one more criterion that allows you to sort and publish your content in different ways and places on your site.

Examples:

- Drupal Gardens' standard 'Blog Entry' content type has three fields: title, body (a text field) and tags.

- A 'Rock Album' content type, in addition to the title and description (body), would need fields like: the track list, the band name, the band members, links to the band website and online sources for the recording, and so on.

- A site about eating out might need a 'restaurant' content type including fields like: review (body), address, opening hours, style of cuisine, links to the restaurant website, links to other reviews, price range, and a text field for additional info (wine list, cocktail selection, brunch specials, etc.). The same blog's 'bar' content type would not have a cuisine field, but perhaps a list of single malt whiskeys on the menu and another of the beers on tap.

Fields contain data: text, numerical, taxonomy terms, images, etc. These can be attached to content types, taxonomy terms, users, and comments to more precisely define the information it should contain.

Example: A content type used to describe members of a high school wind band might have a field for the instrument each plays, one for the number of years they have been playing, one for the year when they will graduate, and so on. A content type used to describe record albums might have fields for the name of the band, the band members' names, multiple track name and track length fields, and so on.

The look and feel of the public pages of your website, the 'front end'. Click 'Appearance' in the administration menu of your Drupal Gardens to create and customize themes using the Drupal Gardens ThemeBuilder.

Menus are formatted lists of links to various places on your site to help you highlight - and your visitors to find - what is important on your site. Your Drupal Gardens site comes with the 'Main menu' enabled and located in the 'navigation' region of your site's layout. You can create and configure other menus on your site at Structure > Menus.

If a menu item links to a page a given user is not permitted to see, Drupal will not display that menu item to the user.

Each menu on your site generates a block for itself that can be placed in any region in your site on the Blocks page at 'Structure > Blocks'.

A module add new functionality to your site. Drupal Gardens comes with a selection of pre-installed modules. You can enable and disable them at Modules > List.

Most modules create a set of permissions when enabled. Check the user permissions page every time you enable a module to make sure your users are given access (or blocked from using) module functionality as appropriate.

Some modules make new blocks and menu items available when they are enabled.

The 'node' is the basic unit of content in Drupal. Most of the content on your Drupal Gardens site is nodes of various content types: page, story, poll, forum topic, etc. Nodes all have a title and can be classified with taxonomy terms. Most nodes have an optional text body. They can also have additional fields of various types (text, numerical, media, and many more); these are added when creating or customizing content types.

Some content in your Drupal Gardens site is not nodes, including comments, custom blocks, headers, footers, and RSS feed items.

A parent item is one that has one or more sub-items, its 'children'.

In Drupal Gardens nodes in books, taxonomy terms, and menu items can be parents and children.

In menus, the children may be displayed in drop-downs when a menu is displayed in the 'Navigation' region, or as indented list items if the menu is displayed in another region.

The Path to any given page in a Drupal website is how the page's URL is constructed.

All Drupal nodes are identified by a unique integer, and have a path like http://example.com/node/12345. Paths like this are neither memorable for site visitors, nor can search engines extract useful information from this when indexing your website.

By default, your Drupal Gardens site assigns a more user-friendly, human-readable 'path alias' (aka URL alias) to your content when you create new nodes like: http://example.com/about.

You define what your site visitors can access and do on your site with user permissions assigned to user roles.

Examples: the permission to create content, post comments on site content, administer blocks, etc.

It is important to understand that permissions on your Drupal Gardens site are cumulative: users with multiple roles have all the permissions assigned to all of their roles. By default in Drupal Gardens, the Administrator and Site Maintainer roles are always assigned all permission available on your site. Most modules and Drupal Gardens features create new permissions when enabled.

Permissions are controlled on your site at Configuration > Permissions.

A node that is published is visible to all site visitors with the 'view site content' permission. An 'unpublished' node, depending on your exact permissions configuration, is generally only visible to site administrators and its author.

Example: When preparing content, an author may leave it unpublished until it has been finished or reviewed for publication.

A region is an area of your site's theme into which blocks can be placed. Drupal Gardens themes come with a number of block regions. You can manage and place blocks in various regions on the Blocks page at Structure > Block and see a preview of your current front-end theme's regions by clicking 'Demonstrate block regions'.

When editing an existing node, you can create a record of changes made to it by checking the 'Create new revision' check-box under 'Revision information' at the bottom of the editing page.

Adding a revision log message in the text box provided (like 'Added new product features 5.5.2010') can help you and site collaborators keep track of the state of your site content.

Once you have one or more revisions of a node, you can also view and revert to previous versions of it.

You define what your site visitors can access and do on your site by assigning them a user role, which has a set of permissions assigned to it. You can assign multiple roles to any user and you can assign multiple users to any role.

Drupal Gardens sites come with four default roles: Anonymous, Authenticated, Administrator, and Site Maintainer. Common roles on many sites include: editor, author, moderator, community user, and so on.

User roles can be managed at Configuration > Roles.

Roles can be assigned to users on the Edit tab of their user profile on your site.

Administrator and Site Maintainer are special super-user roles. These roles will always be assigned every permission for every enabled functionality and always has full access to every part of your site. Assign the Administrator role only to other users whom you trust implicitly.

If you export your site and install it outside of Drupal Gardens, the Drupal-default 'Administrator' role will continue to receive all permissions, but the Drupal-Gardens-specific 'Site Maintainer' role will no longer do so.

Drupal produces feeds in RSS of the content on your Drupal Gardens site, allowing others to subscribe and get automatic notification of new content using RSS-capable programs and applications (e-mail clients, Google Reader, etc.). This is a good way to build your site's readership.

Drupal produces a number of RSS feeds by default. For example, every Acquia Drupal site has an RSS feed of the content promoted to the front page at http://example.com/rss.xml. There are also default RSS feeds for taxonomy terms.

RSS is a set of formats for syndicating web site content. For more details on what RSS is and how it works, see the RSS entry at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS_(file_format).

The taxonomy module allows you to categorize content on your site. You can create one or more 'vocabularies' of taxonomy terms and set them to apply to individual content types or across all of your site. You can create pre-defined vocabularies that have fixed sets of terms and select one or more terms when creating content. You can also create 'free tagging' vocabularies that accept new terms rather than only letting you select previously existing ones.

Example: You can create a dynamic page of all nodes tagged with a particular taxonomy term using Simple Views in Drupal Gardens.

When you create or edit content on your Drupal Gardens site, most of the standard content types can be freely tagged by entering a comma-separated list of terms into the 'Tags' field. These terms then become part of the 'Tags' vocabulary. If you tag a node with the tags 'cars', 'hydropneumatic' and '1960s' it will then be discoverable in any search for any of those terms.

You can configure and administer taxonomies on your Drupal Gardens site at Structure > Taxonomy.

When creating or editing content on your Drupal Gardens site, there is an option to select a 'text format'. These formats are different configurations of filters that control what kind of input is allowed, for example, filtering out certain HTML tags, PHP, or other potentially malicious code.

The default formats in Drupal Gardens are Safe HTML, Filtered HTML, Full HTML and Plain Text.

You should generally only permit trusted user roles (site administrators, moderators, etc.) to use anything but 'Safe HTML' and 'Plain text' since content generated by unknown or untrusted users in full HTML (or filtered HTML if configured incorrectly) presents a potential security risk to your site.

In Drupal, the theme is the look of your website: the layouts, colors, fonts and graphics. You can change any aspect of your site's theme without affecting your site's content or functionality.

In Drupal Gardens, the ThemeBuilder lets you choose and customize your site's look directly in your browser. Click 'Appearance' in the administrative menu to open the ThemeBuilder.

The Drupal Gardens ThemeBuilder is a set of tools that lets you customize your site's theme right in the browser. Click Appearance in the administration menu to open the ThemeBuilder.

A user is anyone visiting or using your site.

What any given user on your site can and cannot access or do is determined by the combination of the user role(s) assigned to them and the permissions assigned to that/those roles.

The concept of 'weight' is often used in Drupal to specify the order of a collection of items that would otherwise be sorted alphabetically or numerically (nodes, menu items, book pages, etc.).

Example: You can set the weight of a menu item when you create it. The 'lighter' items, those with lower weight numbers, will 'float' to the top of the menu (or the left, if the menu is displayed horizontally). The 'heavier' items, those with higher weight numbers, will 'sink' to the bottom (or right) of the menu.

Note that negative numbers are lighter than positive numbers and 'more negative' numbers are lighter than 'less negative' numbers: -1 is lighter than 1, -10 is lighter than -1 and, of course, 1 is lighter than 10.

On some administrative pages you can drag and drop items to rearrange them; this is simply changing their weight in the background.

WYSIWYG is an acronym for 'What You See Is What You Get', describing a content editor with an interface that closely resembles the final output.