Basic Drupal and Website Terms

Here are a few key Drupal terms used in UCSF Site Builder and Drupal documentation. The full Drupal Glossary has more than 100 definitions.

Blocks – The boxes visible in the regions of a Drupal website. Each block contains a set of information that you can add to pages as a distinct group. UCSF Site Builder comes with a wide range of blocks.

Business Owner (Website) – At UCSF a website business owner is a person who is responsible for their site adhering to UCSF policies. They also may determine overall site strategy and who has permission to develop, edit, or publish.

Cascading Style Sheets/CSS – Predefined styles that tell your web browser how to render the visual components of your website.

Content Management System – Server-based software that allows you to manage and edit your site without any special software on your own computer, abbreviated CMS.

Content Manager – A UCSF term for someone who creates, edits and updates content on a website on a regular basis.

Content type – Most of the time different content types have different data fields, layouts and workflows associate with that content type. For example UCSF Site Builder has News and People content types. In Drupal, each item of content is called a node. Each node belongs to a single content type, which defines various default settings for nodes of that type. Most of the time different content types have different data fields, layouts and workflows associate with that content type.

Day-to-day Technical Support (Website) – At UCSF this is the person who routinely updates a website. They may be in a communicator position or maintain a website in addition to other work.

Drupal Developer – A Drupal developer at UCSF is someone who uses PHP, HTML and CSS to build Drupal modules and themes for University websites.

Drupal – Website-building software common in the U.S. education industry, including University of California campuses. The platform supports content management systems, web experience management, and team collaboration. It is based on HTML and PHP code, the LAMP stack, object-oriented core files, and customizing modules.

Modules – Drupal is powered by thousands of software projects called modules. Technical expertise is needed to add these software modules into your site and provide enhanced functionality.

Node – The node is the computer's core unit of storing information. It is often a file identified by a file number. If you're inputting and saving content, you're probably saving it as a node.

Pages – Pages are static content items on your site that include custom content generated by your team (example: 'About' page).

Path – The URL to find a web resource. Drupal has methods of creating automatic paths to content.

Role – A grouping assigned to user accounts that gives all the user accounts classified in that way the same set of permissions.

Taxonomy – A taxonomy is a collection of organizational keywords known in other systems as categories, tags, or metadata. It allows you to connect, relate and classify your website’s content.

Themes – A Content Management System separates content from the visual component called the Theme. You may select from several of our campaign based themes to customize the visual appeal of your selection.

Views – If you want to present your site content as anything other than individual pages accessible via a menu, you need the Views module.

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