Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) with a large, supportive community. It's used by millions of people and organizations around the globe to build and maintain their websites. Many top businesses and government organizations use Drupal, like the Red Cross, Harvard, BBC, NBC News, Twitter, and many more.


Drupal has evolved over its 20-year history into a Content Management Framework and Digital Experience Platform. Drupal is GPL-licensed software that requires no licensing fees and has no restrictions to modify the code of the software. This openness allows Drupal-based projects, modules, and themes to be developed by a worldwide inclusive community of contributors working together to improve Drupal constantly.

Common terms and definitions used with Drupal

Component

A predefined set of fields that can be used to build custom page layouts that are available to be used within certain content types.


Content Type

A set of fields, form display settings, and display settings that are the building blocks for creating content entities in the Drupal CMS.


Field

The base element for storing data within a Drupal site. Fields can be added to any entity as various field types like text, select lists, entity references, and long text fields that support a WYSIWYG editor.


Node

A Node is the content entity type created when adding content of a specific content type. Nodes are number sequentially each time one is added to the site.


Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a Drupal Core module that allows creating relationships between content entities and classify them in to related groups called Vocabularies.


Vocabulary

A Vocabulary is a grouping of related content that is classified by taxonomy terms that can be referenced by a field on a content entity. Vocabularies can also include their own fields as they are content entities.


WYSIWYG

WYSIWYG is an abbreviation for What You See is What You Get. A WYSIWYG is a type of content editor that is included with Drupal and other content management systems that allows you to see what the content will look like when styled and allows some rich text formatting typically.