nodes

The Drupal way: manageable abstraction

Effective Web design is driven by the need to balance flexibility and simplicity. If a system is too simple, it can only be used for a single purpose - but if it is too flexible, it may be too difficult for new users to learn.

Drupal strives to reconcile these conflicting goals by providing its users with the tools they need to make their own content management solution, while still providing some pre-built components to help them get started. Thus, it can be described both as a content management system (CMS) and a content management framework (CMF) - one system which strives to have the strengths of both, without their deficiencies.

Most CMS's are like a toy boat or truck - specific assumptions have been made about their use, assumptions that would be hard for you to override. Frameworks, on the other hand, provide you with raw materials only - you need to know a programming language and have a clear design vision to put them together.

Drupal is like a Lego kit. Skilled developers have already made the building blocks - in the form of contributed modules - that you need to create a site that suits your needs, whether that is a news site, an online store, a social network, blog, wiki, or something else altogether.

Here is an overview of the node object broken down into Drupal 7, Drupal 6 and Drupal 5.

All content on a Drupal website is stored and treated as "nodes". A node is any posting, such as a page, poll, article, forum topic, or blog entry. Comments are not stored as nodes but are always tied to one. Treating all content as nodes allows the flexibility of creating new types of content. It also allows you to painlessly apply new features or changes to all content.

Behind the scenes, the Node module manages these nodes. This module is what lets you:

• List, sort through, and manage all the content on your site.
• Set defaults for how all posts are displayed.
• List and configure the "content types" for your site, and create new ones.

Offering "content types" is a way Drupal allows you to have different kinds of nodes for different purposes. For example, an "article" is one kind of content type, a "book page" another, and a "blog entry" yet another. You can also create new content types of your own.

The Node module manages the creation, editing, deletion, settings, and display of the main site content. Content items managed by the Node module are typically displayed as pages on your site, and include a title, some meta-data (author, creation time, content type, etc.), and optional fields containing text or other data. (Fields are managed by the Field module in Drupal 7.)