Coalface.net

At the center of the Drupal concept is the "Node." A node is many things in the Drupal world, including a menu bar, a header or a forum entry. It is simply a term to identify a basic building block of a Drupal powered web site. These building blocks can contain other building blocks, and can in turn be contained within a building block. Seen this way, a Drupal web site is little more than a large Lego construction with each special piece snapping into place with other pieces to for a whole.

Consider a user forum, for example. Any forum, whether Drupal powered or not, is little more than a series of individual user contributions combined under a common header. The bottom-most building block is a forum entry. This resides within a forum specific to a certain topic or concept, for instance "New Users." The forum is in turn contained within a group of forums, which reside within a web page. The structure might thus look a bit like this:

  -Web-Page
    -header
      -title
      -menus
    -forum list
      -New User forum
        -user entry
      -Forum two
      etc

Each aspect in the hierarchy is a "Node" in the Drupal scheme.

The first step in creating a Drupal web site is to define the node types that will be used. By default, there are several nodes included: Pages and Stories are designed primarily for top-level web pages. Blocks define an area within a web page, for instance the header, footer or body. Menus are for site navigation. Other popular node types have to do with user comments, forum topics and images. It is also possible to define custom nodes for use within your website.

Once the node types are determined, actual information ("content") can be created and added to the web site. One node type can be used several times when creating content. For instance, there is a node type "menu," which can be used repeatedly to create actual menu entries for site navigation. Methods for creating content are as diverse as there are node types. There are articles available that describe creating content using the different nodes:

TODO: Need to add navigation

Another important Drupal concept is that of taxonomy.

TODO: maybe reference the Drupal article on taxonomy?