Drupal Wish #4: Clearer Terminology through Capitalization

When is a page not a page? When the page is a story, a blog entry, etc.

When is a story not a story? When the story is a page, a forum topic, etc.

And so on. Did that make sense to you? If so, you've made the effort to absorb Drupal's self-referential terminology, and can quickly parse a word like "page" to mean a generic web page or a specific type of Drupal node, as context dictates.

"Do you mean, like, just 'page', or do you mean, you know, 'page'?"

There's a lot of instructional material about Drupal written in the Drupal.org handbooks, in modules' README files, on blogs, in books, and so on. And by all accounts, there's a great need for much, much more of the same.

A simple tweak would make Drupal instructional material much easier to understand – even instantly approachable for newcomers. It's this:

Capitalize any Drupal-specific terminology that could be confused with generic words.

We'd quickly recognize "Page" as the node type, not as a web page in general. We'd know that a mention of "story" refers to a narrative (regardless of node type), but "Story" refers to a special node type (regardless of content).

Just as importantly, we'd distinguish "terms" and "vocabulary" – meaning any words, terminology, etc. – from "Terms" and "Vocabulary" – terms with special meanings. Discussing "Drupal terms" is not the same as discussing what I'd write as "Drupal Terms", a difference that'd be perfectly clear with a single capital letter, utterly opaque otherwise.

Keep it simple

There'd be no need to go overboard with the capitalization, turning every Drupal README into a German-style festival of big-lettered nouns. No need to capitalize "menu item"; its meaning in Drupal is the same as its meaning anywhere. Likewise, "node" should be fine as it is; it's given a distinct meaning by our favorite CMS, true, but there's about zero chance of your needing to use the word "node" inside a Drupal text with a non-Drupal meaning.

Key candidates for capitalization are node types (Page, Story, and Blog Entry to start with, probably best extended to all node types for consistency), plus the categorization-related terms like Term, Vocabulary, and Taxonomy.

That alone would be a good start, but please suggest other candidates!

Who's with me?

Fellow Drupalinas, what do you say? Would it be worthwhile for the Drupal community to set (and, we hope, follow) simple guidelines to de-confuse mixed use of words like "page"?