Key concepts and definitions

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You do not need to know many technical terms, but it is difficult to contribute to the website without understanding such key concepts as a user role, a node, a minisite and a taxonomy, which are explained in this section.

Users and roles

Everyone who views or edits this Website is called a User. Users have the following roles:

  • Anonymous user (or Guest) can view only publicly available content of the website;
  • Authenticated user is a member of the CEU community who can Login to the website with their CEU Novell user id and password. Authenticated users can view both public and most of the internal content of the Website, for example, this Handbook which is closed to the public. They can also participate in Website Forums and can edit certain content.
  • Faculty, Staff and PhD students can add, modify and delete most of the academic content of this website within a particular Group of users (e.g. a Department) as well as their own Profiles, Courses, Publications, etc.. They cannot change the layout and the structure of the Website (e.g. the menu system);
  • CEU Administrators have the same rights as Faculty and Staff but they can modify Official Documents and some other official materials on the Website;
  • Editors can change certain layout and structural elements of the Website. They can also add other Users to Groups thus enabling them to edit certain content.
  • Administrators can perform all other technical functions on the Website including assigning roles to Users. 

Your Role is determined by your username. By default, roles are assigned according to your position in CEU (Faculty, Staff or PhD student). If you wish to obtain the role of an Editor or CEU Administrator contact the Web Team.

Nodes

The central concept of Drupal (i.e. the content management system which powers this Website) is that of a "node". A node is a cluster of data, an elementary unit of this Website.

Essentially, a Drupal site consists of various nodes linked to each other. For example, this text you are reading is a "Book page" node. In general, you can think of a node as a simple webpage (i.e. formatted text without menus and other normal webpage elements). Almost all substantive information on the Drupal website is stored in nodes and you will be mostly working with nodes when adding, editing or deleting the content. Nodes can be displayed in many different ways; as Webpages, "blocks", menus, various lists, news feeds or sent to people by Email.

There are several types of nodes we are using at this Website. Most commonly used type of nodes include:

  • Pages (more or less normal webpages);
  • Book pages (hierarchichally organized pages);
  • Academic Programs;
  • Courses;
  • Profiles (of Faculty, Staff and PhD students);
  • Publications;
  • Projects;
  • Official Documents;
  • News;
  • Events; and
  • Blog Entries.

These categories will be sometimes referred to as "Content Types" (CT).

Some node elements are common to all or most Content Types. For example, each node has its Title, most have Body Text (that is what you are reading), the Author, Date of Publication and Internet address (also called URL).

Some other elements of different node types are different to reflect their specific nature. These elements are called "fields". For example, Faculty Profile CT has a field for the First and the Last Name, the Publication CT has several fields for Authors and the Course CT has a field for the academic year in which the course is taught. The fields allow powerful manipulation of the content, for example, filtering the publications by the author or displaying Courses of a given academic year or Faculty Profiles with common research interests.

Minisites

A minisite is a collection of nodes and webpages that are closely interlinked and related to a particular subject. Most of the minisites are those of CEU units (Departments, administrative units, research centers, etc.). The minisite provides certain independence and autonomy in how CEU units and other groups want to present their information.

Here are some examples of minisites:

We discuss how to create, update and manage minisites in the second chapter of this Handbook (for advanced users). Meanwhile here are a few things about minisites which are important for all users from the beginning:

  • any node (profile, course, news, etc.) can be assigned to a minisite (or several minisites); for example, it is logical to assign a profile of a faculty member to the minisite of his/her Department;
  • an association with a minisite may determine how a node is displayed (colours, images, menus in the sidebars, etc.); the style in which the content is displayed is determined by a "Theme", so we can say that each minisite may have its own Theme;
  • an association with a minisite may also determine who has permissions to edit (or view) a particular node; in this way the content of some minisites may be protected from unauthorised viewing and editing by outsiders;
  • an association with a minisite may also determine what goes on certain lists or displays (e.g. all events associated with a particular Department).

Taxonomies

Taxonomies are collections of keywords ("tags") which can be attached to nodes. For example, an event, a course or a publication can be related to one or more Academic Areas. A project can be funded by a Funding Body. So "Academic Area" is one taxonomy (also called "a Vocabulary") and "Funding Bodies" is another one.

We use various taxonomies to organize and display information on the Website. For example, by assigning Research Interests to faculty profiles we make it easy to display a directory of faculty whose research interests are similar. We will discuss the commonly used taxonomies and their purpose further down in this chapter.