Understanding Drupal

Question 1

What are Content Types

Answer 1

Content types are one of the main building blocks within a Drupal site. Content Types hold content. Different content types can hold different kinds of content; an event can hold information that is specific to a time, where a discussion can be used for people to talk. Most sites have multiple different content types, and the name of a content type will ideally give information about how it is used.

Question 2

Node

Answer 2

All content on a Drupal website is stored and treated as “nodes”. A node is any piece of individual content, such as a page, poll, article, forum topic, or a blog entry.

**Comments are not stored as nodes, but are always connected to one”.

Treating all content as nodes allows the flexibility to create new types of conent.

The ability to create different content types is a way Drupal allows you to have different kinds of nodes for different purposes.

The Node module manages theses nodes. – 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.

Question 3

Taxonomy

Answer 3

Drupal’s taxonomy system is used to categorize information. It is a general term that is used to describe how things are categorized.

Question 4

Vocabulary

Answer 4

A vocabulary is a specific, high level subject area. Each vocabulary consists of multiple terms.

Question 5

Term

Answer 5

A term is an individual topic within a vocabulary.

Question 6

Menus

Answer 6

Collection of links; these links can be displayed as a list, as a drop-down items, with graphics, etc depending on how they are styled by the theme.

Question 7

Blocks

Answer 7

Blocks contain and display a variety of information on a Drupal site. They can be created in a variety of ways, and provide a range of options for displaying and theming content.

Question 8

Entity

Answer 8

Nearly every major component that makes up a Drupal site is an entity of one type or another, e.g. users, nodes, and blocks are all types of entities. All entities can then be customized by adding fields to them. Understanding how Drupal’s Entity system works is fundamental to understanding the similarities and differences between the main components that make up a Drupal site. You can alter existing entity types to make them work more efficiently for your site, and it’s also possible to create your own entity types to encapsulate the behavior of specific data structures within your application.

Question 9

Fields

Answer 9

Fields are used to store and display structured information. For example, on a user-profile, you would want to create a “First” and “Last” name field to store normalized data; or you would break an address down into individual fields to store the components of an address. There are also different types of fields; for example, things as varied as email addresses and pictures can be stored within fields, and this allows us to make some assumptions about the information stored in the field.

Question 10

Bundle

Answer 10

a bundle is an entity and all of its fields.

Question 11

Core

Answer 11

Drupal core contains the central codebase of Drupal. Each component of core has a dedicated maintainer, in general, core is the base upon which everything else gets built.

Question 12

Contributed modules and themes

Answer 12

The contrib space contains that has been developed and contributed by people within the community. There is a review process that contributors must go through before they are allowed to contribute modules and/or themes on drupal.org, but even with the review process the quality of code in contrib can vary. There are ways of evaluating contrib modules but in general site maintainers should exercise caustion when installing new code on their site.

Question 13

Taxonomy

Answer 13

Taxonomy is used to classify website content. One common example of taxonomy is tags.

Individual taxonomy items = terms

Set of terms = Vocabulary.

Technology taxonomy terms are an entity type and entity subtype is vocabularies. Like other entities, taxonomy terms can have a fields attached to it.

Question 14

Drupal Versioning System

Answer 14

Semantic versioning system used by more open source projects including Drupal

8.2.6 (8 = Major version 2 = Minor version 7=Patch)

8 Major changes breaks the API

2 Minor = new features, does not break API

6 Patch = bug fixes.