Glossary

Last updated on

30 April 2025

Boxes

Boxes is a Drupal module that is a drop-in replacement for the way Drupal handles custom blocks, also known as boxes.

A [Drupal][#drupal] module that allows users to extend the data structure of nodes. It's mentioned here because CCK is resource-intensive and Managing News circumvents the overhead by using the Data module instead of the node system.

Context

Context is a [Drupal][#drupal] module that allows users to set Contexts. Contexts are collections of conditions to select a location on a site - for example, a certain type of node is being viewed, or a certain menu path is active - and set reactions based on those conditions, such as displaying a block or using a different theme. You can learn more about Context in the drupal.org project page.

Channel

A channel in Managing News allows you to broadcast out aggregated information that meets particular criteria. For example, a channel can combine particular feeds that have a particular tag. See here for more information about creating channels.

Cron jobs

Managing News relies on a page called cron.php to be loaded at regular intervals, which will trigger events like feed importing. You can learn more about setting up a cron job here.

Drupal

Drupal is the platform at the core of Managing News.

Feature

In Managing News, the term feature sometimes has a special meaning. While it can mean exactly what it sounds like - a particular collection of functionality - sometimes it can mean a Feature that has been created with the Drupal Features module. These kinds of features contain a collection of specific configuration changes that have been exported into their own module. You can learn more about Features here.

To disambiguate the two meanings, Features that have been created with the Features module will be capitalized in this documentation.

Geo-tagging

Geo-tagging is using the taxonomy system to tag content with a specific location. By default, geo-tagging is done automatically when a feed is imported. See here more information about modifying Geo-tags.

Hooks

Hooks are a function-naming convention that allow modules to specify functions that will be called to override the behavior of other modules. These are referred to as hook_nameofhook(), where the hook portion is typically the name of the module implementing the hook, and the nameofhook is the name of the hook. For example, to implement the hook hook_features_api(), if your module is called mymodule, the hook function will be mymodule_features_api().

Because Managing News uses Features for much of its functionality, overriding the behavior of a Feature module with another Feature module will often require implementing a particular hook.

Module

Module is a Drupal-centric term that indicates an independent collection of code and functionality that can be added or removed from a site. Managing News is a collection of modules hosted on Drupal.org, as well as custom modules that are hosted by Development Seed. You can learn more about modules here.

Node

A node is typically a piece of content or page. In Managing News, feeds, channels and pages (like in the About section) are all nodes.

OPML

OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language, and is a standard way of exporting and importing lists of feeds. For example, if you were using Google Reader to aggregate a number of RSS feeds, but you wanted bring these feeds into a group environment with Managing News, rather than add all your feeds manually, you could export an OPML file from Google Reader and import it into Managing News. You can read more about OPML here on the Wikipedia page.

Taxonomy

Taxonomy is a fancy word for tagging. In Managing News, taxonomy is used for geo-tagging as well as for tagging content for display in channels.

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