P*****-off pastries and Drupal for n00bs

I had heard the name “Merlin” when Leo was talking about his new Drupal-powered TWiT site, but I had no idea who this person was (some magician, obviously). Well, now I know. I stumbled across his blog, Angry Donuts, yesterday, quite by accident, and I immediately fell for his irreverent approach to the ins and outs of using Drupal.

I haven’t installed Drupal yet, so reading his articles is a bit like sitting in those simulators for drivers ed. You know, like it’s an educational experience but you know the real thing is going to make so much more sense. Nevertheless I found his article, Taxonomy As Container, helpful in thinking about our next big project. Helpful because I realized how pitifully little I understood about the way Drupal works, and how I can use it to organize data. Like, what is a node, really? And I understood the word taxonomy to be a kind of classification but it seemed to have some other meaning when Merlin talked about it… And what is Views? And CCK?? A little googling and I came up with a few answers. (Can you tell what a complete n00b I am regarding Drupal?)

First: A Glossary…
The following I copied directly from the Drupal site.

Drupal uses certain terms to mean specific things. The fundamental elements of Drupal are defined below.

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. With 4.6, block placement can be controlled by the theme, with 4.7 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

Theme Engine

A theme engine is a set of scripts that interprets code and makes theming your site easier. This takes the dynamically generated content and outputs to HTML. Drupal has three theme engines in addition to being able to write a theme that bypasses the theme engine. The default theme engine for 4.6 and previous is xTemplate, for 4.7 it is phpTemplate. See the theme engines section of downloads for contributed engines.

Filter

For handling filtering of content.

Module

A module is a piece of code which extends Drupal to provide a specific piece of 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. Be sure that the version of the contrib 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 within Drupal, it could be a poll, a story, a book page, etc.

Permissions

Permissions control access to content creation, modification and site administration. 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.

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.

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.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is literally “the science of classification”. Drupal uses taxonomy to describe the category system, which you can use to classify and organize content on your web site. In Drupal a taxonomy is a set of categories. There is additional information on the taxonomy system in the documentation.

Template

A HTML-writer-readable file that is mostly HTML with special codes to substitute in values provided by a engine.

Theme

A theme is a file or (usually) collection of files (php, theme, css, jpg, gif, png), which together determine the look and feel of your site. These files are often used by one of the theme engines available for Drupal which is a PHP file of functions which turn arguments into HTML markup. Drupal modules define themeable functions which can be overridden by the theme file. There are additional themes available in the themes section of downloads.

Whew! Glad we know all that now! (Well, we are beginning to…)

Secondly, I found that Views, Taxonomy, and CCK are the names of various modules, all of which I believe will be very helpful to our first project…I think. We have some extensive reading to do and we need an actual installation to play with. Like the kid in the similator, we just won’t know what the gas pedal does until we actually put our foot on it.