Glossary of Terms
403 Page/"Access Denied"
The page that gets displayed when a user goes to a page that is unpublished, or an intranet page that they do not have sufficient permissions to view.
404 Page/"Page Not Found"
The page that gets displayed when a user goes to a page or path that does not exist. "Page Not Found"
Accessibility
The inclusive practice of removing barriers that prevent interaction with, or access to websites, by people with disabilities. When sites are correctly designed, developed and edited, all users have equal access to information and functionality.
Check out our accessibility tips
Learn more about our University Accessibility policy
Admin Menu
The black menu bar at the top of your site after you log in, for performing actions on the site. You must have the administrator role on your site in order to see it.
Alternative Text (Alt Text)
The text associated with an image.
Learn more about Alternative Text
Banner Image
A large image, usually displayed at the top of the page, either in the body or in the header.
Block
Content grouped together that is confined to a designated space on the web page. They are able to be easily moved from region to region.
Brand Bar
Horizontal container above the top of the header including the “Stanford University” logo or sometimes a block “S”. Color is from Stanford palette. Not all sites have this. Example.
Button
Call to Action link or button that is visually styled in order to give it more emphasis.
Cache
A hardware or software component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; data stored in a cache is usually the result of an earlier computation, or a duplicate of data stored elsewhere.
Call to Action (CTA)
Editorial/marketing term, to highlight an action needed to be taken by a user; interaction (link or button) whereby a content author can induce/encourage a user to do something
Card
One of the primary building block components. The card component comes with several optional fields to create content flexibility, including media, subhead, headline, description, CTA text link, and button. A card can display with a container background or not display any background at all.
Content Management System (CMS)
In the context of a website: a collection of tools designed to allow the creation, modification, organization, search, retrieval, and removal of data, content, and information.
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 Stanford wordmark that includes required links to campus resources and copyright information. Dictated by the Stanford Identity Guidelines. Cf. Local Footer.
Header
Below the brand bar (if it is present), above the editable content area. Present on all pages. A horizontal container including the title, search, main nav, Stanford “lockup” or other site title/name (or logo if approved).
Headline
An editorial description of the subsequent text field(s), that is the highest level of priority within its context (headline of a card, or a headline of a page). “Headline” in the context of HTML, will always be a semantic heading, H1, H2, H3, H4, H5, or H6.
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, usually a vanity (e.g. engineering.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
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.
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. Cf. Global Footer.
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 which provides some 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.
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.
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”.
Paragraph
Paragraphs 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 Banner, Card, Text Area for 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 web site). Jumpstart also has a content type known as Stanford Page which includes content such as a featured image and a body field for a basic, static web page on a site.
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 "http://userguide.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, creating a Page is a permission that is only available to the Site Manager roles on Stanford sites.
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.
Platform
Inclusive of the infrastructure, product, and service provided by SWS. Multiple products may be offered on the platform.
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.
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 Stanford Sites Drupal 8 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
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
The Stanford-branded wordmark at the top of your site that includes the Stanford name, the name of the school (e.g. Engineering, Earth, etc. if applicable), and the title of your site.
Subhead / Superhead
A text style inside a component that sits above a headline. This style is meant to act as a label
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 Stanford 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), and may be a local user (an account only exists on the site) or a SUNet 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.
View
A view allows you to change the display of a page, especially if you're looking to display content dynamically (such as based on a set of filters). For example, you can use a view to display a paginated list of nodes of a certain taxonomy term.
Vocabulary
A collection of taxonomy terms.
Workgroup
A list of members in a group, identified by their SUNet IDs, and given a name that uniquely identifies it. A workgroup has two parts: a stem (before the colon) is the workgroup's owner, and the ID (after the colon) is the specific name of the group. For example, the workgroup "gsb:affiliates" has the stem "gsb" and the ID "affiliates". Workgroups are used in a variety of Stanford systems because they can be defined independently of any specific application. For example, a workgroup can be used to set the members of a mailing list, or the list of Site Contributors on a Stanford site, or a group of people who are given permission to access a folder on Box, and so forth. See workgroup.stanford.edu for more details.
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