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Typical Drupal Site Structure

Wed, 10/29/2008 - 18:02

There are many ways to build a Drupal site - which is one of the great things about Drupal, it doesn't make any decisions for you. However, unless a site requires a specific feature, Netuxo always builds sites using similar structural elements - this ensures that are sites are consistent and it easy for any one at Netuxo to maintain them when necessary. This document describes the typical structural elements used by a Netuxo site.

A Netuxo-build Drupal site has three major types of pages, around which all content
is articulated. These type differ in the way they are located in the
site, in the way other pages relate to them, and in the way they are
created.

Understanding how they work and the differences between them is key to managing a Drupal site ; however this should not be difficult, as Drupal sites follow intuitive, accepted patterns implemented by most websites.

The three types of pages are:

  • Stories, used for instance for news items
  • Pages, used for instance for an About Us page
  • Views, used for instance to create a list of news items

A Story in Drupal is a type of content that is meant to be included in a list of other similar items. For instance many sites have a News section, which includes many News items. In Drupal, those individual News item would be created as Stories.

Stories are always part of lists of items - so you will never access a Story directly from the menu of the website. Instead you will have a menu item called (for instance) "Latest News", clicking on it will display a list of News items (ie. Stories), and you then access each Story by clicking on it's title. The following screenshot illustrates this :

List of stories

The content of Stories themselves (what you get when you click on the title of the Story) follow this pattern:

  1. Title of the story
  2. Optionaly, the date on which the story was created and the name of the user who created it
  3. The main body of the story. This is free-form, as entered by the user
  4. The list of files attached to the story

The following screenshot illustrates this:

Story page

The first thing to note is that this is Page with a capital 'P'. A
Drupal Page is a specific type of content - it does not simply
represent any page (with a lower case 'p') of the site.

A Page in Drupal is a type of content that is meant to stand alone.
For instance many sites have an "About Us" page, which is just a single
page describing some content. This is created using the Drupal Page
content type.

Pages always stand on their own. The main Pages will have link
directly from the website menu. The following screenshot illustrates
this:

Main page

The content of Pages follow this pattern:

  • Title of the page
  • The main body of the page. This is free-form, as entered by the user
  • The list of files attached to the page

The following screenshot illustrates this:

Page

Pages are also often used to index subsections of a site. For instance
sites with a very long About Us page may decided to split it in several
sub-sections. Each sub-section would have it's own menu item, but to
ease navigation and site accessibility, it is common to also include
links to the sub-sections on the main About Us page. Note that in that
case, those links are entered manually by the site editor. The
following screenshot illustrates this :

sub page

A View in Drupal is a page which is there to give a list of Stories.
For instance, many sites have a News section, which includes many News
items. In Drupal, those individual News item would be created as
Stories (see the Stories description page). The page that gives the listing of those News items is a View.

Just like Pages, Views always stand on their own. The main Views
will have links directly from the website menu. The following
screenshot illustrates this:

View menu

The Content of a View page follow this pattern:

  1. The title of the View
  2. The filter for the View. This is optional, and allows to filter the
    Stories that get displayed, for instance displaying only the Stories
    that have been tagged with a given category
  3. The introduction text (or 'header') of the View
  4. The list of stories
  5. The conclusion text (or 'footer') of the View

The following screenshot illustrates this:

View page