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Using a Drupal-Powered Website

Mon, 03/04/2006 - 4:04pm — Matthew Davidson

Work in progress. As always, feel free to contribute.

Basic Concepts and Terminology

Drupal is an example of what's known as a Content Management System (CMS). Content Management Systems are designed to help organise collections of information, such as websites. The Drupal system runs on the web server that hosts your site, and is accessed by a normal web browser, such as Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox.

Historically, the fundamental organisational unit of a web site is the 'page'. Pages contain content and hyperlinks to other pages. Drupal's fundamental organisational unit is the 'node'. There are different types of nodes, corresponding to the different types of data you may want on your web site. The simplest kind of node is the 'story' type, which essentially just contains a title, a body, and authoring information.

A page on a Drupal site usually consists of one or more nodes grouped and sorted according to various criteria. The types of nodes available on any particular Drupal site is determined by the set of 'modules' installed by the site's administrator. Modules are optional software components which add to the basic functionality of Drupal. Depending on which modules are installed on your site, you might create nodes which are stories, blog postings, event calendar entries, discussion forum topics, and so on.

In addition to nodes, a page on a Drupal site will typically contain a number of 'blocks'. Blocks are small chunks of information, typically displayed down one or both sides of the page. Blocks can contain special summary views of different types of nodes on your site, navigational menus, and other features which enhance the utility of your site.

See also: Introduction to Drupal Terminology in the Drupal Handbooks

Your User Account

See the following pages from the Drupal End User Guide:

Creating and Editing Content

See Creating New Content and Editing and Deleting Content from the Drupal End User Guide.

The only major difference between our sites and most Drupal sites in this regard is that we use a "WYSIWYG textarea widget" called "TinyMCE". TinyMCE replaces HTML "textarea" form fields with a "What You See Is What You Get" HTML editor, making the process of creating and editing pages significantly simpler for non-technical uses.