Cracking Drupal®: A Drop in the Bucket

Drupal-Specific Jargon

Most of these terms have specific meanings outside Drupal, which are often the same as their Drupal meaning. Nonetheless, this is a list of the most common bits of jargon in Drupal and some peculiar aspects of these words.

Block

These are generally small bits of dynamic content provided by modules in a site and are commonly decorations around the sides of a page. It is also possible to manually add blocks containing static HTML to a site.

Breadcrumb

Taken from the European children's story "Hansel and Gretel," breadcrumbs give a visual indication of your current location within a website. Drupal provides breadcrumbs and also has a means to alter the breadcrumb, as shown in Figure G-1.

Figure G.1. The breadcrumb when editing an input format

Clean URL

Within Drupal, URLs are said to be clean if they do not include the "?q=" URL parameter. For certain web servers, it is necessary to use this parameter, as in http://crackingdrupal.com/?q=node/1, but for most servers it is possible to configure the much more intuitive format without the ?q=, so that the URL is simply http://crackingdrupal.com/node/1.

Contrib

Drupal core is extensible by modules, themes, translations, and install profiles. These different additional packages of code and configuration are often contributed by users of Drupal to the repository of code on drupal.org. Collectively they are ...