Drupal - A Content Management System

Drupal is a content management system, similar to other widely used systems like Wordpress. Drupal is primarily used in education and government spaces because of it being open source and it offers a wide variety of contributed modules and extensions for the most widely used use cases.

At CIRES, we have a vast majority of our websites in Drupal where the following help documents will help you navigate the most common workflows ( logging in, creating content, editing content, and uploading media ). While these documents are primarily focused on the main CIRES website, they are applicable to most all of our websites in varying degrees of use cases and complexity.

The most important thing to know is that we adhere to a COPE approach ( Create once publish everywhere ). This is to say, that we don’t want you spending time fiddling with html or styles, but instead to log in, add in your content, save it and be done. Once your content is saved it will automatically display where it should on the site, for example, you add a new news item on to your site, it will display in the news section or perhaps on the front page in a ‘recent news’ section depending on your wants.

Common Vocabulary for Drupal

• Content Type → A type of content ( e.g. news, event, resource ) that has defined and unique fields for users to enter information into.
• Node → A singular page on Drupal
• Paragraph → A block of fields that can be dynamically added into a content type, can be though of as a mini-content type. Note that not all of our websites utilize paragraphs.
• Views → A list of content in a display, ( e.g. news in a 3 column grid )