Site content
In Drupal terms, when we talk about site content we generally mean the information in the main part of the web page, such as the article you are reading now.
A piece of content often consists of a single article or topic, for example:
- A news story, if you are providing news or events coverage (or just news about the site itself).
- An information page, such as the Contact page.
- A tutorial article, like this one.
- A blog postings etc…
All of these are examples of content which have been typed in, either by the site administrator or by some other user who has been given permission to enter content. This content isn't limited to plain text, you can add formatting, images, hyperlinks … pretty much anything you might see on any other website.
Under the hood, Drupal stores each of these items of content as a node, which is a database entry holding the body text, title, plus various other information.
As you will soon see, a characteristic of Drupal is that adding and editing content works in a similar way to reading content, and it is very easy to do.
Types of content
There are two default content types in Drupal.
Stories are intended to hold things such as news stories, announcements, details of upcomomng events, and similar things.
Pages are intended to hold more permanent information, such as your website contact information etc.
Don't worry too much about the distinction, it will become clearer as we go on. You can create new types of content for yourself, and you will find that certain optional modules in Drupal add their own content types when they are enabled.
In addition, your website will probably contain other pages whuch are created automatically by Drupal, without anyone having to type them in. For example, by default the front page (home page) of your site will display a short excerpt from all of the most recent stories posted on the site. Drupal does this automatically without any effort from you (although of course you can put something else on your front page instead).
In this section we will learn how to add, edit and delete content, and how (and why) to create new types of content.