About Drupal CMS

Drupal is a very powerful content management system but it's pretty clear that beginners have a though time using it, and the Drupal specific terms aren't at all helpful. Yes, the taxonomy system is how content is categorized but why the hell don't they just say categories?

What are nodes, pages, stories, blocks and all those other terms that Drupal is using?

Taxonomies:

Let's see what the Drupal handbook has to say about the taxonomy system:

Nodes can be organized into categories, also called taxonomies. Forums are an example of content nodes organized by category. Categories can be hierarchical, where one parent category contains multiple child categories.

Yup - taxonomies are categories. The thing that makes them different from other category systems is that they can be used as tags (set them when you write a page) and you can have the same page in more than one category at a time (some content systems don't have this option).

This makes the taxonomy system very powerful and to call taxonomies just categories would be an understatement; still, if that makes it more comfortable for you just do it!

Nodes:

In Drupal, a node is a piece of content. It may be in the form of a page, blog post, story, poll, forum thread or any other content type. But why is the content called nodes and not just what it actually is - a page or blog post?

Although, I must confess, I'm not sure about this, I believe it's Durpal's modular nature that calls for this way of organization. As long as you remember that a node is a piece of content you'll be fine - just like I am :) .

Input formats:

This one will get your panties in a bunch if you don't know its importance. The input formats are a set of filters that will go through the text you submit and then process it before display to the user. There are 3 input formats, one of them being set as default (when creating a node you can choose another input format just for that node).

The default for every installation is "Filtered HTML", which you should leave if you plan on having a site where there are contributors. This filter allows only a few tags to be used (a, em, strong, code, ul, ol, li, cite, dt, dd, dl), the rest will be stripped by the system.

The "Full HTML" allows all HTML tags to be used, and "PHP code" lets you run PHP code. These should only be available to trusted editors or administrators, as they can do some damage if used with malicious intent.

Throttle:

This is a useful feature for heavy trafficed sites, and even better if you get slashdotted or dugg. When your site gets a certain number of visitors (you can define this) modules start being turned off to take some of the pressure off the site.

After you enable the throttle module you will have the option to select which modules are to be throttled, and I suggest throttling everything except the basic modules that run your site.

That's it for this tutorial. Hope it helped!

source: http://needforcontent.com