terminology

Drupal has its own jargon; it can range from confusing and counterintuitive to downright maddening. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it's a start.

This page discusses some general concepts that will be useful as you begin to explore Drupal. For more details on these concepts you may follow the links to additional documentation.

Entity

Drupal 7 introduced the concept of entity which is one instance of a particular entity type.

• An entity type is a useful abstraction to group together fields. Entities types are used to store and display data, which can be nodes (content), comments, taxonomy terms, user profiles, or something custom developed.
• Bundles are an implementation of an entity type to which fields can be attached.
• A field is a reusable piece of content. Examples of fields include a number, date or some text.

Read more about Entities in the Entity API documentation.

Node (Content)

A node in Drupal is the generic term for a piece of content on your web site. A node consists of several fields depending on the type of node, which is defined as content type. For instance, a basic content type includes fields such as title and body fields. Other examples of content type are: pages in books, discussion topics in forums, entries in blogs, and news article stories.

This glossary describes terminology and acronyms used in the Drupal project and by the Drupal community.

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A

action #

A function that operates like a stored procedure. The function parameters, if any, are stored in the database and the function is executed by retrieving these stored parameters and calling the function.

anonymous #

A visitor to a Drupal website who is not currently logged in. Drupal considers any such visitor as being the anonymous user, with the user ID 0, and belonging to the anonymous user role.

API #