By gustav on
I sense some reluctance in drupal to use the term "node" in the user interface or the end-user documentation. But I have also not found out what the recommended alternative word is. Sometimes "post" is used, but this does not really fit all content types. "Content item" would be a very sane terminology that has an obvious meaning, but perhaps it is not elegant enough?
I am sure there must be a discusssion about this somewhere but I can not find it.
The reason I am asking now is that I am looking for good terminology to use for the subscriptions module (http://drupal.org/project/subscriptions) which allows you, among other things, to sign up for notifications of changes to individual nodes.
Comments
I'm completely fine with
I'm completely fine with "node" after I understood the system. It took me about a week or two to fully grasp how Drupal works, but I think changing it now would be a mistake.
The worse thing you can do is mix and match terminology. Call it what it is unless everything changes to reflect the new terminology. It has caused utter nonsense with the taxonomy system. Taxonomy is what it is. Call it that. A node is what it is... call it that. There should not be another word for a node -- unless everyone agrees on a global change.
I would consider it a serious harm to try and call it some thing else, and while I am still relatively new, I am 100% against doing this.
I do not want to pick up a reference book just to find out the difference or similarity of a "node" and "content item" actually is.
Consistency is what I desire, don't you?
I can see both points of view here
My users generally don't have a clue what a node is (and struggle with the word "browser" on a bad day...) but I similarly want to mess with the guts of drupal...
My solution is to include a Glossary / Reference Table / Terminology - call it what you will - section at the front of the documentation explaining the system term and then what it means in English for the users after that. That way, I can continue to use the proper terminology and the users are pre-warned.
Node - Single discrete "item" of content on the website. Nodes can be of multiple types (stories, blogs, articles, details, etc), are created by authors (=users) and have various information such as taxonomies and comments associated with them.
Taxonomy - separate lists of "keywords" used to categorise and file articles on the site; to assist in user navigation; and to allow visibility control to priveliged members.
Is this list worth expanding and publishing as a handbook page somewhere? Is this information already out there? Happy to have a go at making it better and more widely available if the community in interested in it
Gareth
Ironic.
Hm. What an idea. A quickstart glossary.
And who would read such a page? And how would they find it?
Obviously the first thing a user would do when confused is look to see if a manual is available!
Hey, how about actually building it into the Drupal Distro? So they'd be sure to see and read it?
Yeah. We should put an item on the main admin menu. So it's always there.
Called, I dunno ... "help"
Link it like admin/help or something.
Then everyone would see it and read it.
That would solve the problem totally.
You think?
.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/
.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards
End users shouldn't need a
End users shouldn't need a glossary. And programmers are smart enough to know that a "post" or "article" is a dummed-down word meaning a certain kind of node.
If you want to sell a "car" you don't advertise a "hydrocarbon-combusting quad-piston vulcanized-wheeled non-turbo-charged vehicle".
"Node" is abstract and meaningless to all but Drupal developers.
Seeing as the user mentioned
Site Documentation, I assumed this was to be part of a "handover pack" or similar to a client. I'm doing this sort of thing at the moment for a site I run on a voluntary basis for a community. My though was, and probably explained badly, a page be provided that could be copied in to this documentation to get the next admin (who may never have seen Drupal) up and running as quickly as possible.
Horses for courses and all that.
Gareth
Um, to point out my own bad joke ...
You may have missed it, as I was being overly facetious, but the glossary page I described did exist exactly like that in all historical versions of Drupal. I didn't however notice it has recently been dropped from Drupal6.
I'll copy it here for Hysterical Porposes, in case you've really not seen it before. I guess it was dropped because no-one ever read it. Or so somebody thought. I dunno.
If your handover recipient isn't even going to read to the second paragraph under the clearly marked 'help' link built into the system... there's not much hope for the rest of your documentation pack. :-(
Yeah, I've written a few ...
Glossary of Drupal terminology
.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/
.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards
Yep. The issue that removed
Yep. The issue that removed it was http://drupal.org/node/189388.
We probably should put an updated one back somewhere, but at the time, there wasn't much interest (myself included) in trying to "fix" the glossary, especially in light of all the other string changes going on.
(And, for what it's worth, I thought your original post about this was pretty funny.)
--keith
...
Before the advent of the automobile, car probably meant something entirely different, perhaps railway car, or perhaps was a shortened form of cart. Of course, we all recognize "car" now. Original patents, though, called "cars" by any number of other names, including "road engine".
When Drupal becomes as ubiquitous as automobiles, perhaps we'll all look back fondly at a time when no one knew about "nodes".
My point -- there was a time when "car" didn't make sense in its current context and had to be explained, just as "node" may need to be explained now.
--keith
Yes it is
http://drupal.org/node/937
Yep
Consistency is the main thing, and I also think 'node' is a perfectly good word, and one that causes less confusion long term. I've started a discussion in the usability group on this subject since it's come up in a few different places recently.
Drop the jargon!
I made this same point in another post, but no-one seems to understand that end-users are not programmers. It also doesn't help that the word "node" has some specific and historic use in Drupal.
Personally, I would go for something like "post", or "story", or "article", even though "node" does have a different meaning, and these other words already have specific meanings in Drupal.
But if you want to give Drupal wider appeal, drop the jargon!
You may, but 'post' is way
You may, but 'post' is way too bloggy for all the sites I've produced. Posts and articles are for news and diary sites. They exist, but do not define the core of web content management.
Most of my clients want 'pages'. Corporate sites and reference sites. And even then I have to struggle to explain that the taxonomy/term/view pages are not 'pages' that are managed through their wysiwyg.
If there was a better term, it would have to be equally generic as 'node'. And probably equally meaningless :)
.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/
.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards
"Node" may be generic, but
"Node" may be generic, but it is abstract and meaningless. At least "post", "article", "story" gives an approximate indication of what a node does.
Conceptually, a "page" may consist of a collection of one or more "articles".
"Post" may be bloggy, but I intuitively have an idea of what it does. There are many such synonyms, such as "contribution", or "Submission", or "composition", again, all of which I understand.
"Post", "Contribution",
"Post", "Contribution", "Submission" all do mean something intuative - they mean that your publishing model is a forum/community/blog/magazine/BBS style.
That's all good for sites that run on user-generated content, but it looks a lot more transient and flaky than pages like Wikipedia Entries, Handbook pages, Technical references, Company profiles... y'know, edited content..
I'm NOT saying node is a good word, and I do agree that at some level every content item could be called any one of these terms and still do the same job. But I have to remove "post" from the docs and UI. And website owners shoudn't have to "submit" to their own site ;-)
The first thing I have to do on a new Drupal site is turn off all the 'community' features - because I use it as a framework to build traditional sites and non-traditional web applications ... but not multi-user community portals full of blog posts, twitter and diggs. Even things like author information get zapped early in the theming. Yet I still have to describe some of the instructions in blog terms. "It's at the top of the list because it's the most recent addition. It thinks it's a blog post. :-("
There may be a better word to use. I just don't feel that "post" or discussion-board jargon is it.
It's just semantic quibble, I know, but to propose a change, we need an alternative everyone can get behind.
.dan.
How to troubleshoot Drupal | http://www.coders.co.nz/
.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards
...
I think "content" and "posts" are the recommended alternatives depending on the context. "Content item" is not bad, but I've never seen it used.
I don't mind "node" so much, if we were to define and use it consistently. In pre-6, there was a small glossary of terms at admin/help that got removed in 6 because nobody wanted to rewrite it. For 7, we probably should add something like that back. AFAIK, the only time we really use "node" in user-facing core text now is in the embedded help for node module (admin/help/node).
--keith
Node is good
I don't think it would be a good idea to replace node, neither with content, nor with post.
First of all node is a decent English word, although hardly anyone seems to know what it means. One of it's meanings is knot. I think of content on Drupal as a big web, and everywhere where two or more lines meet there is a knot, a node. Depending on the type it can be an article, a story, a bumble or a wiggle anything! And that is the beauty of node, it is neutral in it's meaning.
What I agree with is that visitors to Drupal sites should not have to know what a node is in Drupal, but if we would use the word node more often and more consistently in descriptions and node management tasks than people wouldn't have any trouble learning this word.
What would probably a good idea on for the UI and especially the node/add interface is to put a title tag on the word node so that people get a little description of what a node is in Drupal. This could be applied to alot more terms as well (including taxonomy).
Ridiculous
I'm really tired of this care-taking "from the cradle to the grave" attitude about users of a system as customizable as Drupal. Do you honestly think that anyone who won't take a minute to figure out what a node is will actually spend more than a half hour with a web framework before throwing it in their trash bin and going back to ripping the latest Will Farrell refuse from the Pirate's Bay?
I think the obvious answer would be to have a link next to the definition of a node that says "click this if you don't have the patience to read this tiny paragraph?" and then send them to the pay for hosting pre-loaded Wordpress site so they can be coddled.
This is serious software... and if "node" needs to be changed into something else for the weenies and "usability experts" who are one step away from begging for money on the streets, then I must humbly put forward the evocative "milk jugs", "jugs" for short, or if they truly must wimp out like a bunch of rotten cowards, then simply call them "containers"... but since I had the ability to read the tiny paragraph, "node" works fine for me.
The people for whom I create
The people for whom I create a Drupal site will NEVER understand what a node is... they are not computer literate. My father, for example, is 80 years old, and still doesn't know the difference between a file and folder.
But if I tell them that Drupal can let them create their own "articles", he doesn't need to know the relationship of nodes to databases.
And since you and I can understand that an "article" is a lax term for node, then everyone is happy, and we've communicated one of the most important features of Drupal.
So?
If you can tell your father that a node is an article, then what is the problem? Not to go on a personal attack, but you'd have to be pretty lazy to not take 2 seconds tell your father that a node is an article. But if your father can't tell a file from a folder, I don't see how telling him this is an article would help him either.
Also, if you can't create a content type as a node for your users named "article", then there is something wrong with you as a person creating sites for other people.
You see this same exact phenomenon in public schooling. Instead of demanding the highest standards for all, the states and departments of education set lower mandatory standards so that "more will be passed through". Somehow it is reasoned that it is better for more people to pass than it is to make sure that those with the most ability and potential get the best education possible as a result of higher standards.
On top of that, those that support the lower standards don't see it as a net negative that they deprive those with greater ability of the best education possible for them.
Drupal is an enterprise class web framework meant for serious developers to create the best possible interactive web designs and applications they can muster. It isn't a charity case for the masses to affirm themselves as many other web programs do that better and are actually designed for that purpose.
Here's hoping this cancerous "dumbing-down" mentality never takes a bite out of Drupal. Not only would it hurt its standing among serious developers, but it would completely reverse itself from being a clear leader that is blazing a trail for the future of the web itself. The Core Drupal developers have earned a right to be on the forefront of the creation of that future web.
I should mention
that my original reply here was not directed at gustav but more to the hysteria of the discussion by other users on this thread.
/n/add/article
I see two different categories Drupal users: site visitors and site builders. Site visitors already don't have to know what a node is and to make that even clearer we could abbreviate /node in the url to /n. That way site visitors are completely secured from having to wonder what a node is. Also n could stand for number which is intuitive I think because http://example.com/n/1231245 looks like page number 1231245 for naive users, no problem at all.
Now for people who build Drupal sites I don't understand why they would complain about node. It is a beautiful, generic, neutral word with a very specific meaning. And you want to be specific with things, right?! So if you want to change the word node, then come up with a good alternative. The problem is it would have to be something very generic, neutral and don't have cross-references to things like posts, content, articles or the like. Be specific and say node!
This is a problem with root
This is a problem with root in English because this language is not enough to describe what a node is in a single word. I suggest to use a word in another language, so people may found it in wordreference(SEO friendly?). I can't understand why to use the word node if it still cause confusion.
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(3 John 1:2) Dear friend, I pray that you may enjoy good health and that all may go well with you, even as your soul is getting along well.
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DevElCuy