Glossary

Last updated on

15 July 2025

This glossary describes terminology and acronyms used in the Drupal project and by the Drupal community.

A

action

A function that operates like a stored procedure. The function parameters, if any, are stored in the database and the function is executed by retrieving these stored parameters and calling the function.

anonymous

A visitor to a Drupal website who is not currently logged in. Drupal considers any such visitor as being the anonymous user, with the user ID 0, and belonging to the anonymous user role.

API

An application programming interface (API) is a particular set of rules (“code”) and specifications that software programs can follow to communicate with each other. The Drupal API is documented in the API Reference.

argument

A section of the path for a page on a Drupal website. In the path /node/937 the first argument is “node”, and the second is “937”. Some modules, most notably Views, allow the use of “wildcard” arguments that allow a particular page to vary depending on context.

Article

One of two content types that are enabled in the standard installation profile. Articles are used for time-sensitive content like news, press releases or blog posts.

ADO

Api.drupal.org. API reference site for Drupal developer's documentation.

B

Basic page

One of two content types that are enabled in the standard installation profile. Typically basic pages are used for static content that can (but are not required to) be linked into the main navigation bar.

Base theme

A Base theme is a well-written set of CSS and template files that a theme developer can make use of in a new custom theme. Theme developers can make sub themes to override the default base theme. Some of the popular base themes include Zen, Omega and AdaptiveTheme

block

The boxes visible in the regions of a Drupal website. Most blocks (e.g. recent forum topics) are generated on-the-fly by various Drupal modules, but they can be created in the administer blocks area of a Drupal site. See the documentation for more information on blocks.

BoF

Birds of a Feather (BoF) refers to an informal discussion group. Unlike special interest groups or working groups, BoFs are informal and often formed in an ad-hoc manner. BoF meetings are common adjuncts to planned "sessions" at Drupal camps and at DrupalCons

book

A set of pages tied together in a hierarchical sequence, perhaps with chapters, sections, subsections, and so on. You can use books for manuals, site resource guides, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), or whatever you’d like. To use books, enable the core Book module.

branch maintainers

See core committers

breadcrumbs

The set of links, usually near the top of the page, that shows the path you followed to locate the current page. For example, it might show Home > Macadamia Nuts > Current Events > News Articles, meaning that you started at the home page, clicked on “Macadamia Nuts” in the menu, then selected “Current Events” in the sub-menu, and finally selected, “News Articles.” The term breadcrumbs is borrowed from Hansel and Gretel, who left crumbs of bread along their path so they could find their way back out of the forest.

bundle

A specific implementation of an entity type. For example, the node entity type has bundles called content types. Default node bundles are “page” and “article”.

C

cache

The core Drupal cache stores assembled pages and blocks for anonymous visitors in the cache tables in the database. Other popular Drupal caching options include boost, memcache, and authcache.

callback

The mechanism for registering a path so that the correct function is fired when the URL is accessed. They are not shown in the menu. For understanding callbacks see Drupal’s page serving mechanism.

camp

A camp is a one to two day event that focuses on many aspects of Drupal in one location. Its focus is knowledge sharing amongst the community. Essentially, you’re getting the community together to do some community training. See Organizing Drupal Camps for more information.

clean URL

A URL that does not contain code. By default, Drupal uses and generates URLs for your site’s pages that look like “http://www.example.com/?q=node/83.” By enabling clean URLs this will be rewritten to “http://www.example.com/node/83”.

CMS

Content Management System (CMS), in the context of a website, serves as ;a collection of tools that allow the creation, modification, organization, search, retrieval and removal of information. Besides Drupal, other CMS's include Wordpress and Joomla!.

configuration management

Introduced with Drupal 8 as a way to keep track of the important details as you configure and revise your site. Drupal 8 comes with a file system-based configuration management system, which provides tools for transporting configuration changes such as new content types, fields, or views from a development server to a production server (or similar). It even lets you use version control for your configuration. Save your config data from the database to files. Learn more about basic configuration management concepts.

content

The text, images, and other information on a web site. Besides nodes there is more content on a typical Drupal site, such as comments and file attachments.

content type

Every node belongs to a single “node type” or “content type”, which defines various default settings for nodes of that type, such as whether the node is published automatically and whether comments are permitted. Common "Content Types" that just about any website would have include: blog post and page. Content types can have different fields and modules can define their own content types. The core Drupal Book and Poll modules are two examples of modules that define content types.

context

Multiple meanings depending on use.

Context: A popular contrib module which allows you to vary the theme, block layout, menus, etc. based on conditions such as the content type, current user, etc. It is frequently used to provide variety in the user experience across different sections of your site.
A key concept of the ctools module which was taken from Panels. Contexts provide a consistent wrapper API for various objects (nodes, users, etc.). This greatly simplifies the coding necessary to make user interface functionality aware of the objects that could influence its behavior.

contrib

Contributed. Modules or themes that are not part of the core Drupal product. Contributed modules and themes are available from the modules and themes sections of Drupal.org. These are separate from the Drupal “core”, although over time they can become part of it. Similar concepts exist in other software and are sometimes called “plugins”, “add-ons” or “extensions”.

core

The files and modules included with the Drupal project.

core committers

Drupal developers that review proposed changes to the Drupal core and maintain code. They are the only ones who have write access to the core Git repository.

core contributor

Developers who contribute code patches or documentation for the Drupal core. Contributions are peer reviewed and then evaluated by the core committers.

core maintainers

See core committers

critical path

The code that is run when serving a cached page.

D

D6

Drupal 6. Any version 6 of Drupal, including all minor versions 6.x.

D7

Drupal 7. Version 7 of Drupal, which includes any minor version, e.g. Drupal 7.0, Drupal 7.23

D8

Drupal 8. Version 8 of Drupal, which includes any minor version, e.g. Drupal 8.0, Drupal 8.1. D8 can also refer to beta versions, e.g. Drupal 8.0.0-beta10 or versions still in development stage, e.g. Drupal 8.x-dev

DA

Drupal Association. An organization dedicated to helping the open-source Drupal project flourish.

delta

An index for fields, blocks, etc., of the same type.

DO, D.O.

Drupal.org. The website of Drupal “(where you are right now)”.

display mode

In Drupal 8, "Display Modes" is an area in the core interface under "Structure" that comprises view modes and form modes, both of which are used to create custom displays of entities and their edit forms.

distribution

A single downloadable archive containing Drupal core, contributed modules, themes, and pre-defined configuration. A distribution provides site features and functions for a specific type of site. They make it possible to quickly set up a complex, use-specific site in fewer steps than if installing and configuring elements individually. An index of distributions is available at the Distributions page.

DrupalCon

The semi-annual conference dedicated to gathering Drupal practitioners. It alternates between a North American location and a European location.

Druplicon

The Drupal mascot. It is a neologism formed from joining the words “Drupal” and “icon”.

Drush

Short for "Drupal shell". A command line shell and scripting interface for Drupal. ;Full details on the Drush GitHub page. ;

DX

Drupal Developer Experience.

E

entity

Any defined chunk of data in Drupal. This includes things like nodes, users, taxonomy terms, files, etc. Contributed modules can define custom entities. Each entity type can have multiple bundles.

F

FAPI

The Drupal Form API.

feature

Drupal configuration exported into code using the Features module. In Drupal 7, Features has become the standard way of exporting and versioning configuration that is stored in the database so that it can be moved from development to QA to production in a repeatable manner.

field

Elements of data that can be attached to a node or other Drupal entities. Fields commonly contain text, ;terms, or an image.

filter

A tool for stripping out HTML, PHP, JavaScript, and other undesirable elements from content before pages are displayed. Other filters add formatting and features such as smilies. It is possible to create custom filters that allow or forbid only those tags you wish. More information is available at the Text filters and Input Formats page.

flag

Using the flag module, any number of customisable "flags" may be added to any entity, e.g. for bookmarking, marking something as important, or as spam, marking users as friend, or flagging issues on Drupal.org. ; ; ;

form mode

A form mode is way to customize the layout of an entity's edit form. In Drupal 8 this is located under Structure > Display Modes.

G

GDO

Groups.drupal.org. The site that serves the Drupal community by providing a place for groups to organize, plan and work on projects. Real world local user groups in particular are encouraged to setup their online presence at GDO.

H

hook

A PHP function that is named foo_bar(), where “foo” is the name of the module (whose filename is thus foo.module) and “bar” is the name of the hook. Each hook has a defined set of parameters and a specified result type. See also theme hook.

I

input format

A tool for defining the processing that happens to user-entered text before it is shown in the browser. Usually different user roles are given permission to use different input formats depending on how much they are trusted. For those roles, the input format may often be available as an option that shows up underneath the body of a node edit form. For more information, see the Text Filters and Input Formats documentation.

i18n

Numeronym for internationalization, replacing the 18 middle letters with “18”. Internationalization refers to enabling translations and other-language support (including alternate character sets and right-to-left rendering) in computer systems.

issue

A unit of work to accomplish an improvement in a data system. An issue could be a bug, a requested feature, task, missing documentation, and so forth. The Drupal community uses the issue queue to work as a team. If you need help with a specific project, whether it is a module or theme, you should go to the issue queue.

J

JDO

The Drupal Jobs site.

L

l10n

Numeronym for localization, replacing the 10 middle letters with “10”.

M

machine name

Also machine-readable name. The text string used by the computer to identify a resource, as opposed to the human readable name shown in the user interface.

maintainer

Single community person which is responsible for the module, also has the right to commit a patch into module. Can be multiple people per module.

In Drupal, the term refers both to the clickable navigational elements on a page, and to Drupal’s internal system for handling requests. When a request is sent to Drupal, the menu system uses the provided URL to determine what functions to call.

migrate

Moving content from other sources into Drupal or from Drupal 6 or Drupal 7 into Drupal 8. See Introduction to migrate D6 to D8

multi-site

A feature of Drupal that allows one to run multiple web sites from the same Drupal codebase. See Multi-site - Sharing the same code base

module

Code that extends Drupal features and functionality (but doesn't provide the HTML markup or styling of a theme). Drupal core comes with required (pre-installed) modules and some which are optional. Thousands of non-core or “contrib” modules are listed in the project directory. ;

N

NID

Node ID. The unique identifier for each node. It can be found in the path to the node. For example, a node with path, “http://drupal.org/node/937”, has a node ID of “937”.

node

A piece of content in Drupal, typically corresponding to a single page on the site, that has a title, an optional body, and perhaps additional fields. Every node also belongs to a particular content type, and can additionally be classified using the taxonomy system. Examples of nodes are polls, stories, book pages and images.

node type

See content type.

P

page

See Basic Page People also use the word "page" to mean a web page (i.e., a page you get to by navigating to a specific URL on a web site).

path

In Drupal terms, a unique, last part of the URL for a specific function or piece of content. For instance, for a page whose full URL is http://example.com/?q=node/7, the path is “node/7”. Drupal can use clean URLs if the Path module is enabled, which would change the full URL in this example to http://example.com/node/7; the path would still be “node/7”.

permission

In Drupal, a permission is a tool for controlling access to content creation, modification and site administration at the application level. Administrators assign permissions to roles (such as "Administrator", "Authenticated User" and "Anonymous User"), then assign users to those roles. The first user of a Drupal site (User1) automatically receives all permissions. In operating systems like UNIX, permissions are security settings restricting or allowing users to access information or perform certain functions at the operating system level. In the case of files on UNIX systems, there are three types of permissions: read, write and execute.

published

The state of a node that can be viewed by visitors to the website. To easily hide nodes from the public (i.e. anonymous role), go to the add/edit form of the node and uncheck the ;“Published” select box. This effectively unpublishes ;the node.

Q

queue

A job management technique. Jobs waiting in a line (queue) are usually processed on a first in, first out basis or by priority, if specified. The Drupal community uses the issue queue to work as a team. If you need help with a specific project, whether it is a module or theme, you should go to the issue queue.

R

reference field

A type of field that allows authors to create a relationship between an entity and one or more other entities. For example, authors might "tag" an article with taxonomy terms using a Term Reference field. Other reference fields can be used to define other kinds of relationship (for example, between nodes and other nodes, or nodes and users). Depending on the Drupal version and/or contributed modules installed, these might be called Entity Reference, Node Reference or User Reference fields.

region

Defined areas of a page where content can be placed. Basic regions include: Header, Footer, Content, Left sidebar, Right Sidebar. Different themes can define different regions so the options are often different per-site. Content is assigned to regions via blocks. They can be ordered by weight within regions to define the order in which they display. Content with a more negative weight, such as -10, will appear above content with a more positive weight, such as 1.

render array

Render arrays are the basic building blocks of Drupal content. Further details can be read on the Render Arrays documentation page.

roles

A name for a group of users, to which ;you can collectively assign permissions. There are two predefined, locked roles for every new Drupal installation: authenticated user ;(anyone with an account on the site) and anonymous user ;(those who haven't yet created accounts or are not ;logged in). Additional roles can be created and users can belong to more than one. See users, permissions and roles.

RTBC

Reviewed and tested by the community. RTBC is one of the statuses given to issues in the issue queue.

S

schema

A formalized array structure representing one or more database tables and their related keys and indexes. More information can be found in the Schema API.

T

tag

See term.

taxonomy

In Drupal, "Taxonomy" is the name of a powerful core module that gives your sites use of terms. In Drupal, these terms are gathered within vocabularies which the Taxonomy module allows you to create, manage and apply.

teaser

A short introductory sentence or paragraph about a piece of content that informs readers about the subject of the content. By default, the first paragraph or two of the content is used (there is a setting for how much), usually with a link to the complete node.

template

A file to express presentation (vs. program logic). Templates are mostly written with a markup language like HTML with variables representing data provided to the template. The variables in templates substitute in values provided by a theme engine.

term

An organizational keyword, known in other systems as categories or metadata. A term is a label that can be applied to a node. They are also known as tags.

testbot

A continuous integration service for testing patches submitted to project issues on Drupal.org. These are maintained by the Drupal.org Infrastructure team.

theme

A collection of templates files, configuration files and asset files (JavaScript, CSS, images, fonts) which together determine the look and feel of a site. A theme contains elements such as the header, icons, block layout, etc. Drupal modules define themeable functions which can be overridden by the theme file. There are additional themes available.

theme engine

A set of scripts that interprets code and makes theming a site easier. These scripts take the dynamically generated content and output it to HTML. Drupal has three theme engines in addition to being able to write a theme that bypasses the theme engine. The default theme engine is PHPTemplate. There are additional theme engines.

theme hook

An identifier used by the calls to the theme() function to delegate rendering to a theme function or theme template. Modules which extend Drupal may declare their own theme hooks to allow themers to control the markup of that module in their theme. Theme hooks are distinct from API hooks, although similar in concept.

trigger

Defined by modules, triggers typically result from some characteristic change in an entity maintained by a module. Some examples of triggers are: deleting content, adding a comment that a user has logged in, or adding a term. In addition to the triggers provided by the Drupal core modules, triggers may be added by installed contributed modules.

triage

A new bug or issue is assigned a priority based on its severity, frequency, risk and other predetermined factors, borrowed from medical term triage.

U

UID

User ID. The unique identifier for each user. It can be found in the path to the user profile, e.g. “http://drupal.org/user/1”

unpublished

See published

update

Moving from one minor release to another, e.g. moving from Drupal 7.12 to Drupal 7.14. See Upgrading from previous versions.

upgrade

Moving from one major release to another, e.g. moving from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8. See Upgrading from previous versions.

user 0

Anonymous user – anyone without an account or who has not logged in to the site. Although anonymous users don't have a profile, they still have a record in the users table because they still can be assigned ;certain permissions (e.g. viewing comments or using the contact form).

user 1

The first user created on installation (and thus with a UID of 1 in the database). Granted additional (all) permissions and ;referred to as the site maintenance account in Drupal 7.

UX

user experience. An umbrella term referring to the overall experience and satisfaction a user has when using a website. It is important to note that this “includes only what the user perceives and not all that is presented.”

V

view mode

A view mode is way to customize how an entity is rendered. Examples are 'Full Page', 'Teaser' or 'JSON'. In Drupal 8 this is located under Structure > Display Modes.

Views

A module which allows site developers a graphical interface for creating lists of various Drupal entities; most notably users and nodes. Views permits selection of specific fields to display, filtration against various attributes, choice of basic layout options (i.e. list, full entities, teasers, etc.), and other more advanced features. Many Drupal sites use Views extensively. In Drupal 8, the Views module is part of Drupal Core.

view

In reference to the Views module above, a view is what is created when the site builder adds or creates a new view from the interface. Each view uses a table in the database as a "base table" to build a list of objects. The view by itself is an abstract wrapper of instruction that are inherited by each view display created within the view.

view display

In reference to the Views module above, view displays are created inside of a view to display the objects fetched by the view in different manners. For example, a view called "Blog Posts" might have view displays for "Top 5", "Most Recent", or "Posts by Author".

vocabulary

A vocabulary is a collection of terms in a taxonomy.

W

weight

Weights define the priority or order in which a function or hook is processed or a block / node is displayed (e.g. menu items). Lower weight values (-10) float to the top of lists, while heavier (+10) weights appear lower. ;

Other resources

For alternative explanations of Drupal terms or slang and acronyms used in software development, these external sites may be useful:

Acronym Finder: Dictionary of acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms.
Jargon list from www.catb.org “Hackers slang”

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