Phrases That You Need to Understand When Talking to a Drupal Developer: Module and Taxonomy
This is the third post in the series, where you can find more phrases often used by Drupal programmers. Please familiarise yourself with them, as well as with the other texts in order to work more effectively with Drupal developers.
The most commonly used phrases related to Drupal
Other articles of this series can be found here:
- Phrases that you need to understand when talking to a Drupal developer: Node
- Phrases that you need to understand when talking to a Drupal developer: Field & Block
Module
Drupal module can be compared to an application installed on the phone. It is a code package delivered by programmers, which does something the Drupal core does not.
You can find thousands of free modules at https://www.drupal.org/project/project_module It is worth to check out the first few pages of this list to know what are the possibilities of extending Drupal's functionalities.
Modules can do many different things in Drupal. In the earlier text about [Fields], I gave an example of the Address Field module, which adds a new field type to the system.
One of the most popular modules is Pathauto allowing for automatic generation of URLs based on patterns, e.g. a webpage title. It is extremely helpful for SEO.
Speaking of SEO, it is also good to use Redirect Robots txt and Metatag.
You may ask: why are these modules not in the Drupal's core if they are needed for every website due to SEO?
However, Drupal is not just about websites. In many cases, it is used as a web application or a backend system that transfers data to other systems, e.g. in JSON. These modules are useless then.
Some of these are modules designed especially for programmers. They do not add any configuration options; they provide additional functions in PHP, allowing programmers to write next modules. These modules often have API in their names.
Some modules improve certain elements in the Drupal's core, e.g. Admin toolbar improves the use of the administration menu.
Thanks to an additional reCAPTCHA you can secure forms against bots, e.g. the contact form.
Currently, there are over 9,000 modules available for Drupal 8/9. Such a vast number of free components makes building your website faster and cheaper.
When talking with a Drupal developer about new features on your website, it is good to ask him: "Is there not a ready-made module for this"?
Taxonomy
Sometimes it is good to classify the system's contents. If you own a news website, you can divide information into, e.g. news from around the world, local news, sports news, technology news. That is what the Drupal taxonomy is for.
In Taxonomy, you define Vocabularies and attribute so-called terms to them.
It is best to use an example here. You can define a "Car brands" vocabulary and add to its terms like Audi, BMW, Honda, Mercedes. Elements with such vocabulary can be expanded without limit – you do not have to define all of them at once. When creating content ([Node| https://www.droptica.com/blog/phrases-you-need-understand-when-talking-drupal-developer-node/]), you have the option of displaying items from a given vocabulary and selecting one or more (depending on the settings).
Other examples:
- "Countries" vocabulary containing a list of countries
- "Blog category" vocabulary containing, e.g. Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, Laravel, Symfony, React, Vue
- "T-shirt colours" vocabulary containing available options – "White", "Blue", "Red", "Black"
In addition, I would like to point out that Taxonomy is also an entity type, like Node. This means that you have access to the "Manage fields" settings. You can expand the form for adding terms with an additional field, e.g. for a vocabulary with a list of countries you can add an Image field in which you can insert the flag of a given country.
Keep in mind that the Taxonomy module is used to group content according to different categories. The programmer can display these grouped pieces of content in different parts of a website (e.g. add a block with the last 3 blog posts from the Drupal category on the main page).
Summary
This is the third article of the series. From these three articles, you already know what a Node, Field, Block, Region, Module and Taxonomy are. Now you have a large vocabulary of phrases used in Drupal, and you can talk much more efficiently with a Drupal development team.
If you have not seen the previous articles of the series yet, you can find them here:
