Drupal Nodes

It is a strange but never-failing effect that people who know a lot about a subject start building their own language; they create words that are obvious to everyone initiated in the language, but sheer nonsense for those who aren't.

Surgeons may use stents, carpenters have sharpening jigs and sailors know how to raise and lower a jib. Drupalistas, too, have their share of strange terms – some of which you will learn in this book. The most important of them is probably node.

A node is a piece of content on a Drupal site. It can be an information page, a blog post or a press release. Content you don't usually read as separate web pages can also be nodes, such as images, videos, or containers to collect pages with restricted access for certain users.

As a Drupal developer, one of the most important things you will learn is how to use nodes to build the information structure on a website. This chapter explains how to use the basic features of nodes.

TIP: In Drupal 7, the term node has almost completely been replaced with content. But the term node is still widely used by many modules (plugins) and in documentation. This makes it important to know and recognize. For our purposes, the terms node and content are used interchangeably if not otherwise stated.