Glossary of terms

An anchor link, also referred to as a page anchor or jump link, is a type of hyperlink employed within a webpage to guide users to specific sections on the same page. Learn more about adding an anchor link.

Dynamic content means the website can change what it shows based on certain rules. The 'Embed View' Paragraph Type helps create these dynamic content or views. For example, you can show only articles about cats. The view updates automatically with new articles or changes in criteria. You can also change how the content looks, like displaying it as a grid or a list view. Dynamic views make websites interactive, and personalized and give a better user experience.  

Drupal

A Content Management System (CMS)/web development platform which enables you to store content that can be displayed on a webpage.

Global Footer

The non-editable section at the bottom of the page with the SLAC wordmark that includes required links to campus resources and copyright information.

Grouper

Grouper is a tool that simplifies access management by letting you use the same group or role in many places in your organization. It is used in the new Drupal templates to automate changes to access privileges as a person’s role changes. It empowers the site owner to manage access, taking IT out of the loop.

Hero / Banner / Hero Banner

A component that is often at the top of a page and often spans the width of the browser (or is a wide content area). Editorially, this component is meant to highlight, feature, or callout content (including imagery content by itself). It can include overlay text with links or buttons and/or media.

Home Page

The main page of a website that audiences land on when they navigate to the site’s root URL (e.g. drupalguide.slac.stanford.edu).

HTML Headings

H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, H6. https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_headings.asp

Image Styles

Image styles determine how an image is displayed and can be used for resizing or cropping images. 

Jump-to Link (or Anchor link)

Links that direct visitors to a specific part of a page, rather than the entire page itself. This is useful for faster access to referencing content that is further down the page. Learn more about adding an anchor link.

Launch

The process of making a site "live" to the public. Usually, this involves making the site visible to search engines, submitting the sitemap to search engines, removing all placeholder content, ensuring that the site is compliant with accessibility, and enabling more caching on the site for faster loading.

Local Footer

A site’s instance of its own footer, pertaining to the content within the site. A local footer will likely include the Unit Signature (or custom logo), physical address, contact information, links and/or menus, social media, and/or other types of content that end users would benefit from access to having in this global position across a site. This footer sits persistently above the Global Footer, at the bottom of all site pages.

Manage Content

The page where users can view, sort, and filter all the content on their site. It is also useful for performing bulk operations on multiple nodes.

Module

A block of code in Drupal that provides specific functionality. They are either built into the core Drupal code or are contributed by members of the Drupal open source community. Modules must be enabled and in some cases configured to work properly.

Navigation (also known as Menu)

A list of links with high visual importance that allow end-users to visit different pages of the website by clicking, tapping, or keyboard navigating. Navigation displays all of or parts of the information architecture and its hierarchy of pages. In Drupal, a "menu" or "menu block".

Node

A unit of content stored in Drupal’s database with a unique identifier A node may be a page, a blog post, a news article, etc. The page you are viewing now is a node.

Paragraph Types

Paragraph Types allow the site manager or contributor flexibility to organize the content in multiple ways and the order in which they want to place them instead of putting all the content in one Text Area. See Add Section (Configurable Column Layout), Add a Quote, and Add a Table as examples of paragraph types. 

Page

A generic term used to describe a web page (what you see when you navigate to a specific URL on a website). 

Parent Link

Objects can have hierarchical relationships, such as menu items, taxonomy terms, paths, and more. A parent link usually refers to the menu item that a child is nested under. For example, if one were to have a menu that had a link to a People overview page, and then a link to a Faculty page nested underneath, the People overview page would be the parent.

Path

In Drupal terms, a unique, last part of the URL that is for a specific function or piece of content. For example, for a page whose full URL is "https://drupalguide.slac.stanford.edu/get-started", the path is "get-started".

Permission

A setting that controls access to content and functionality within a Drupal site. For example, setting site-wide alerts is a permission that is only available to the Site Manager roles on SLAC sites.

Primary Navigation (also known as Main Menu)

The first level of navigation in a site’s information architecture, below the homepage. (Not “tabs”, not “main nav”, not “top-level nav”...) Lives in the Header/Masthead region.

Published/Unpublished

The state of a node that determines if it can be viewed by anonymous visitors to the website. To easily hide nodes from the public, make the node unpublished by unchecking the "Published" setting in the node edit form.

Quick links

They are a collection of links to frequently used application pages that enable users to perform common actions. Learn more about featuring quick links.

Regions

Sections of a Drupal web page, these sections allow you to place your content in a particular area of the page.

Release Notes (also known as changelogs)

Release Notes contain information regarding any update to the SLAC Sites Drupal 9 platform.

Revisions

Revisions can be enabled on a node or a page to allow for the tracking and moderation of content changes on a node or page.

Roles

The set of permissions given to a user that defines what they are and are not able to do on the site. Check out the Managing access page for more information.

RSS feed

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It’s an easy way for you to keep up with news and information that's important to you and your site. News content can be pulled directly into your site and placed on your site's homepage.  This content is called a "feed." Learn more on this page.

Secondary Navigation (also known as secondary or sidebar menu)

The second level of navigation within your site’s information architecture. It often resides in the left sidebar of a page, as part of the side navigation/sub-navigation.

Side Navigation

The level of navigation within your site’s information architecture that correlates with the webpage’s position in the navigation hierarchy. It often resides in the left sidebar of a page, as part of the side navigation/sub-navigation.

Site Title Lockup

Below the SLAC Primary wordmark is the Site Title that includes the name of the organization (e.g. SLAC Information Technology). For the four approved facility icons of the SLAC scientific facilities LCLS, SSRL, FACET-II, and Cryo-EM, a lockup system that includes an icon, acronym, and site name can be applied from the drop-down: Content > Site Settings > Organization Details.  

Summary Text

A trimmed, formatted version of a text field or body content, usually the first paragraph or two of body content.

Taxonomy

A label that is assigned to a node or content type. Taxonomies provide a way to group similar types of information, which can be leveraged to improve your site’s flow.

Taxonomy Terms

An organizational keyword, known in other systems as categories or metadata. A term is a label that can be applied to a node. They are also known as tags.

Title (webpage|<head> metadata)

What shows up in your browser tab.

Title (page)

The h1 element on a page.

URL Redirects

When your old site is replaced by a new site, the paths to your pages may change from your old site to your new site. URL Redirects will map URLs from your old site to the new pages on your new site so as to avoid having broken links.

User

An account on the site that can be assigned to a role. The user may or may not be authenticated (e.g. anonymous user) or a SLAC user (account is handled through a single sign-on system).

UX

Short for "User Experience"; the goal of UX design in business is to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility and ease of use in the interaction with a product.

WYSIWYG / Text Area

Short for "What You See Is What You Get"; a visual HTML editor usually found in node edit forms that allows easier formatting of content without coding directly in HTML. The WYSIWYG editor may be set to strip out certain types of HTML tags, such as IFRAME or EMBED type tags. Because of that, an author may have to use the Full HTML mode in order to retain those elements in the display of a page