What is a node?

You’ve probably wondered about this when looking at your browser’s address bar, where the word “node” frequently appears.

Node is the main class in Drupal. All site content is a node — Blog entries, Pages, Stories, and any other content types we’ll create in future lessons.

When you go to the URL your_site/node/17, Drupal interprets it as follows:

node – the class to be loaded;

17 – the object ID to be loaded.

If you add "edit" to the URL, like your_site/node/17/edit, then Drupal sees "edit" as an action to be performed on node 17, namely to open the editing interface for that node.

As mentioned earlier, node is the base class for other content types. Each node object has the following attributes (properties):

body – the document content
changed – last changed date in Unix format
comment – whether comments are allowed. It can have three values.
comment_count – number of comments
created – creation date in Unix format
data – was NULL
files – attached files
format – input format ID, starting from 1
last_comment_name – likely the name of the last commenter, though for me it was NULL
last_comment_timestamp – date of the last comment in Unix format
log – was empty; not sure what it is
moderate – moderation flag; if node doesn’t require moderation = 0
name – author name
nid – node ID; in the earlier example nid=17
path – relative path alias (e.g., "content/page-with-latin-url")
picture – user avatar
promote – “Promoted to front page” = 1; otherwise = 0
revision_timestamp – revision date in Unix format
status – published = 1; otherwise = 0
sticky – sticky = 1; otherwise = 0
taxonomy – taxonomy parents (categories); we’ll talk more about taxonomy later
teaser – teaser, or summary version of the body
title – document title
type – content type
uid – author’s user ID
vid – version ID of the node; does not always match nid

All properties of a node are stored in the database, and when a request is made for a node, this data is retrieved and displayed by Drupal. In future lessons, we’ll look at how to display nodes (like Blog entries or Pages) using the Views module, and we’ll also create a new content type called "Employee" using the CCK module.