ergophobe - 3:57 pm on Oct 19, 2011 (gmt 0)

Hey websitedesigningsing,

Welcome aboard and thanks for kicking off an interesting discussion. It got me thinking not just about where Drupal is, but where it's going. I'm still mostly using Drupal 6, but have been transitioning to Drupal 7 and your comments fit in nicely with some of the changes we're seeing in Drupal.

I would say that your comments are all true through Drupal 6. With Drupal 7 and even more with Drupal 8 I think, the primacy of the node is attenuated by the switch to entities. This means that taxonomy terms become first-class entities and therefore are exposed in ways similar to nodes. By Drupal 8, the pre-eminence of the node that we are used to in Drupal will be gone.

The whole terminology of Drupal ("nodes", "taxonomy") has always revealed it's geek roots. The switch to "entities" makes that worse rather than better. But to me, the strength of Drupal has always been the level of abstraction. It makes it harder to get simple things done than in Wordpress, but much easier to get complex things done.

With entities, there is an even greater level of abstraction and more items on the page exposed to the basic module and templating system.

So in the future, I'd say that the "content" in Drupal will come to mean more and more what it means on a hand-edited page. That is to say, whatever the editor thinks it is. That said, to me "content" is always the text, images and video that support the main idea of the page. Everything else is... something else, for which I don't have a good name!