In a recent post we talked about 5 reasons to consider Drupal which lead to some questions about how to compare Drupal to other content management systems (CMS) like Drupal versus WordPress.  If those or other reviews have led you to consider Drupal then you need to start understanding “Drupal-speak.”  Every software application brings some unique languages and Drupal is no exception as you don’t speak Drupal unless you understand Drupal nodes.

A node can be thought of as an article in a newspaper.   Just like you can have multiple articles on one page in a newspaper, ou can have multiple nodes on a Drupal page.  A node can be text, an image or an image and text. If your Internet store is selling books than a node for you might be a picture of the book, a summary of the book,a review on the book or the price of the book. Basically a node is a single piece of content that is published on a Drupal site. Examples of additional nodes are polls, stories, book pages, images, etc.

Another way of defining a node is to consider them the main building block of Drupal. Drupal.org suggests that you think of a node as a single puzzle piece that is placed onto the site.  Another analogy is that a node is a container for stuff.  Some of that stuff is the content you create. A node can be part of a forum, a blog or a book.  If you already have a Drupal installation, then click on “Create Content” and any content you create there will be considered a node. Drupal comes with a two standard node types - a page and a story.

Each node will have a type, referred to as a Content Type. It will also has a Node ID, a Title, a creation date, an author, a Body (which may be ignored/omitted for some content types).  A node is stored together with all other nodes in one big “shoe-box” known as a “table” in your database.

Using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) you can create you own node types which can be collection of many types of data.  If you want to create a book node with an image, price, publisher, publication date, author address, etc as fields in a node then CCK will help you to build this node type.

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2. Deciding on Drupal versus WordPress
3. 5 Drupal Settings for New Installs
4. Speed Up Your Drupal Installation
5. FREE CW2 Buoyant Drupal Theme