Glossary

This glossary provides definitions of key terms and technical jargon used throughout the user manual for the website. Familiarizing yourself with these terms will help you better understand the instructions and explanations provided in the manual.

  1. Content Management System (CMS): A software application used to create, manage, and publish digital content on websites. Drupal is an example of a CMS.

  2. Admin Interface: The backend or administrative section of a website where authorized users can manage and configure various aspects of the site.

  3. User Roles: Different levels of access and permissions assigned to users within the website's admin interface. User roles define what actions and functionalities users can perform.

  4. Permissions: Rights and privileges granted to users based on their assigned user roles. Permissions control access to specific features, actions, or content within the admin interface.

  5. Dashboard: The main control panel or homepage of the admin interface. It provides an overview of the website's key metrics, recent activity, and shortcuts to commonly used features.

  6. Configuration: The process of setting up and customizing various aspects of the website, such as site information, appearance, user roles, and global settings.

  7. Content types: Content types are one of the main building blocks within a Drupal site. Different content types can hold different kinds of content. For example; an event can hold information that is specific to a time, whereas a discussion can be utilized to host user discussions. Varbase has default content types with the ability to add more, the name of a content type should ideally give information about how it is used.

  8. Node: Within Drupal, a node is a piece of content, typically a page with a designated url. All data stored via a content type is a node.

  9. Taxonomy: A taxonomy is a system used to categorize information. It is a general term that is used to describe how things are categorized. Taxonomy can be used within various content types to create different groupings or categories.

  10. Vocabulary: A vocabulary is a specific, high level subject. Each vocabulary consists of multiple terms. For example, β€œEvent type” can be an example of a vocabulary and within the Event type there are multiple terms like: "Public" and "Internal".

  11. Term: A term is an individual topic within a vocabulary. For example, "Public" from the previous example is a term for β€œEvent type” vocabulary. Admins and content designers on the site are free to add, edit, and delete these terms.

  12. Menus: A menu is a collection of links listed in a specific manner. These links can be displayed as a list, drop-down items, within the main header or footer etc. The different menus used depends on how they are styled in the design. It is important to distinguish that a menu is not a collection of pages but rather links that direct to pages or external sources.

  13. Blocks: Blocks are used to build components that are inserted within a node. They can be created in a variety of ways, and provide a range of options for displaying and theming content.

  14. Responsive layout/mode: A responsive layout is a web design approach which aims to deliver an optimal viewing experience across all screen sizes on mobiles, tablets and desktops.

  15. Entity-queue: A feature that allows the admin to control the order of content within a view/display.

  16. URL Path: The portion of the url after the domain name is called the path. For example, the path for the Media page is /media.

  17. URL Aliases: A display for urls that allows the admin to provide a more human and search engine friendly name for the content, and masks the original URL (i.e. node). This is necessary for both UX and SEO.

  18. Headings: Heading tags are used to define the headings in your page. There are 6 available headings: h1 being the biggest and boldest and h6 is the smallest. Headings allow for a clear web page structure which makes crawling web pages by search engine crawler bots easier and more effective.

  19. Meta-tags: Meta-tags are a series of descriptions and identifiers that provide search engines with information about the site and content.

  20. Sitemap: The sitemap is a full list of the URLs in the website that is submitted to search engines for indexing.

  21. Theme: Theme refers to the frontend and style of the website.

  22. Layout: Layout refers to the structure of a web page. Typically refers to the width/columns breakdown of the page.

  23. WYSIWYG: WYSIWYG is an acronym for What You See Is What You Get. This is also called the Rich Text Editor. This allows the user to design web pages by using various essential editor tools.

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