Drupal is a content management system like WordPress or DNN. It allows for non-technical users to add, update, and remove content from a website. Out of the box, it provides all the functionality you would need to build a site that features pages, blog posts with comments, and global content areas, like fat footers and headers.
Out of the box, Drupal is comparable to WordPress in terms of capabilities, but because of its exhaustive collection of community contributed (contrib) modules, it’s more frequently being used as an application framework, oftentimes going far beyond the functionality attributed to most content management systems.
How Does Drupal Work?
Out of the box, Drupal allows you to create pages and blog posts, create navigational structures called menus, and manage users and the comments they post to the blog. It’s important to become familiar with the Drupal lexicon, as it differs from WordPress and DNN.
Nodes
The basic unit of page-based content in Drupal is called a node. Out of the box, Drupal provides two kinds of nodes – basic pages and blog posts. Generally speaking, nodes have a unique URL where they can be viewed. For instance, if you were to create a “basic page” node and give it a URL of /about-us, anyone going to /about-us would see the full contents of that node displayed in the main content region of the page. They can also be displayed in lists, usually in a summarized view containing the title of the node and a brief excerpt. Blog posts are also nodes because they have unique URLs, but they have some additional functionality that is unique to blog posts.
Content Types
Content types are one of the most useful features of Drupal. Basic pages and blog posts are two separate content types. A content type is a sort of blueprint for a specific kind of content. Basic pages might only have a title and a body field, whereas a blog post might have a field that contains a biography of the author in addition to the title and body.
Content types can be modified, created, or deleted. In practice, we find that we usually create several content types for clients, often times including content types for news and for events. We’ll create a news content type that contains a field not only for the title but for a subtitle, and not just body content but also a link to an external article the news item is based on. The event content type usually contains a start and end date/time, and a location field.
When you assign a field to a content type, then when creating nodes of a particular content type, those fields become available to the user entering the content. Fields are one of many different types, including simple text fields, formatted text fields that allow you to use a WYSIWYG editor to work with formatted text, numeric fields, link fields for entering unique URLs, date/time fields, image upload fields, etc. There are many contrib modules that add field types. An interesting example is the GeoField module, which provides a field that stores a latitude/longitude pair and can be used to geolocate content.
![Blocks_Admin_Page]()
Blocks
Blocks are reusable widget-like pieces of dynamic or static content (without a URL). Blocks can be assigned to certain global regions in a theme so that they are displayed throughout the site. A typical example of a static block would be the copyright notice we place in the footer region. We create a single block and can assign it once to the footer and it will be displayed on every page. An example of a dynamic block is the user login block. On some sites that allow users to register and log in, the login block can be assigned to a sidebar and will show up in that sidebar on multiple pages, but will not show when the user is logged in. Because the block’s display is controlled by logic, it is known as dynamic as opposed to static.
Menus
Out of the box, Drupal provides a way to create, edit, and delete menus and menu items that show up in your site’s navigation. Drupal provides some default menus, like the Main Menu. When creating nodes, you can assign them to a menu so users can navigate to your new page. Any menu in the system also provides a corresponding dynamic block that you could place in the header, footer, or other region to provide navigation for users.
How do we use Drupal?
Using only the basic building materials that Drupal provides out of the box would allow you to create a basic, yet very functional website, complete with a blog and a multi-tiered navigational structure. In practice, clients are looking for considerably more functionality as well as custom branded designs and integration with other platforms such as CRMs or marketing automation systems.
Most serious Drupal developers, including those at r2i, use many different contrib modules to vastly expand what a Drupal site can do.
Views
The most popular contrib module for Drupal is called Views. The Views module allows you to create dynamic lists, tables, and other displays of data in your Drupal site. The Views module allows you to specify what kind of content you want to display, specify any filters, sort the list of content, and display only a few chosen fields, like the title and the start date.
Views has many advanced features, but in general, we find views useful for:
- Displaying recent news, events, press releases, etc in a block on the homepage
- Displaying a “featured” piece of content in a block
- Displaying a list of archived press releases
Panels
Panels is another very popular module that helps to solve the challenge of needing separate homepage and interior page layouts. Panels can be used along with the built-in block paradigm to take over where that paradigm begins to fail. Generally, the header and footers stay the same throughout a site, whether you’re on the homepage or on an interior page. The traditional theme system and blocks work well, as the header and footer regions will always be present and in use. We begin to use panels for everything in between. We will often have only a single region in the theme for the main content, which basically holds everything between the header and footer, and then use panels to manage the display of the main content.
In general, we leverage Panels because they can have different layouts based on logic you can define.
How are we Changing Drupal?
Up to now we’ve described what Drupal is, how it works and how we use it at r2i. After having worked with Drupal for many years, we’ve seen it continue to get better and better, but there is still room for improvement. We’ve seen novice Drupal users struggle at times with the enormity of the contrib module ecosystem. Without guidance, it’s understandable that some folks fall under the impression that Drupal is actually more difficult to learn and use than other content management systems. By curating this collection and using our years of experience to build onto this foundation, r2i is able to transform Drupal into the truly elegant, intuitive, robust CMS experience that our clients look for.
The key is starting with the right foundation.
