Terminology

This document describes the vocabulary used by Drupal and the Drupal community.

Block

Blocks are the navigational or content additions that generally live on the left or right side of a page when you view it in your browser. Block placement can be placed elsewhere via the admin settings. Blocks are not nodes, they are just a way of positioning data within a page. The look of blocks can be controlled by each theme by defining the block($subject, $content, $region = "main") method.
Configuring and Managing Blocks

CCK (Content Construction Kit)

A powerful contributed module which permits site developers to define custom fields and content types. A variety of extension modules to CCK exist permitting specialized field definitions such as images, dates, and computed values

Core or Drupal core

Refers to the Drupal files and modules included with the Drupal project download.

Core committers

A team of Drupal developers that review proposed changes to the Drupal core and maintain code. They are the only ones who have write access to the core CVS repository.

Core contributor

Core contributors are software developers who contribute code patches or documentation for the Drupal core. The contributions are peer reviewed and then decided the core committers.

Code Freeze

Refers to a date at which no new features can go in the next version of Drupal, unless specific dispensations have been made by the core committers, and even then only when the impact on other systems is minimal. At this time focus in coding Drupal core shifts to bug fix and usability improvements. It is the time when contributed module developers can begin working on updating their code to work with the next version of Drupal.

Cron

Cron (short for chronograph) is a command scheduler that executes commands or scripts (groups of commands) automatically at specified time/date intervals. Drupal uses a 'cron job' to perform periodic tasks that help keep Drupal run smoothly and efficiently.

CVS (Concurrent Versions System)

CVS is a version control system used by Drupal code contributors to coordinate their individual code changes centrally. CVS records everyone's changes to a given project in a directory tree called a CVS repository .

Filter

Filters are used to strip out html, php, javascript, and other undesirable elements from content before pages are displayed. It is possible to create custom filters that allow or forbid only those tags you wish.

Logs

A log is simply a list of recorded events containing usage data, performance data, errors, warnings and operational information. Watchdog is Drupal's primary event log.

Menu

In Drupal, the term menu refers both to the clickable navigational elements on a page, and to Drupal's internal system for handling requests. When a request is sent to drupal, the menu system uses the provided URL to determine what functions to call.

Module

A module is software (code) that extends Drupal features and/or functionality. Core modules are those included with the main download of Drupal. Contributed (or "contrib") modules are available for separate download from the modules section of downloads. Note: Be sure that the version of the contributed module you wish to use matches your version of Drupal releases section lists modules by Drupal version

Node

Almost all content in Drupal is stored as a node. When people refer to "a node" all they mean is a piece of content stored within Drupal. A node could be a poll, a story, an image, a book page, etc. more...

Path

In Drupal terms, path usually refers to the url to a specific function or piece of content. Drupal can use "clean url's" when the path module is enabled.

Permissions

1) Drupal - Permissions control access to content creation, modification and site administration at the Application level. Administrators assign permissions to roles, then assign roles to users. The first user id of a Drupal site (uid=1) automatically receives all permissions, no matter what role that user belongs to. Anonymous user is uid0.

2) Unix/Linux/Windows - Permissions are security settings restricting or allowing users to access information of perform certain functions at the Operating System level. In the case of files on Unix or Linux systems, there are three types of permissions: read, write, and execute.

Roles

Roles are sets of permissions that can be applied to individual users. Users can take on more than one role. Two roles, authenticated user (those users that sign up for an account) and anonymous users (those either without an account or not logged in) are supplied by default with Drupal installations, but they can be configured and the first user can create additional roles.

RSS

RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication, a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a feed or web feed or channel) contains either a summary of content (teaser) from an associated web site or the full text.

Style

A CSS file (or files) replacing the default CSS of a theme or engine. Appears in the theme selection list with the same precedence as themes and templates.

Tarball

In computing, tar ("short for tape archive") is both a file format and the name of the program used to handle such files. The jargon term tarball is used to describe an archive that has been created with the tar command. A .tar file is commonly referred to as a tarball. Tarballs are used within the developer community to collate collections of files into one larger file, for distribution or archiving, while preserving file system information such as user and group permissions, dates, and directory structures.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is literally "the science of classification". The Drupal taxonomy system allows enables users to categorize content using both tags and administrator defined terms. It is a flexible tool for classifying content with many advanced features. Further information can be within the taxonomy system documentation.

• Term - a category or tag or keyword ie what gets assigned to nodes. Terms can be children and parents of each other to create hierarchies. Terms are the only hierarchical part of the system.
• Vocabulary - a collection of terms that share some sort of relationship with each other. The vocabulary isn't part of any hierarchy as such.
• Taxonomy - the name of the whole system and the name of the module that implements it. This used to be the name of the menu item in the admin menu.
• Category - the more recent "user friendly" name for Taxonomy and new name for the menu item. It was changed a couple of versions back because newbies seemed to be scared of the word "Taxonomy" - but the ambiguousness of the word "Category" seems to have created more confusion than it solved.

For alternative explanations of Drupal terms, these external sites may be useful:

• "Getting started with Drupal" page by the IBM Internet Technology Group