Book Image

Drupal 7 Social Networking

Book Image

Drupal 7 Social Networking

Overview of this book

Drupal is ideally equipped to serve as a base system for creating a custom social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. While these large social networks have their place, niche social networking websites can help promote businesses, products, projects, and hobbies of any nature. Drupal 7 Social Networking provides careful instructions and clear explanations to take you through the setup and management of your social network site, covering topics from users, to marketing, to maintenance. It will help you create your own social networking site, suitable for whatever audience you choose! Starting from the very basics of both Drupal and Social Networking, right through to more complicated aspects, you will progressively learn how to add to and expand your social networking site and add more features. You will learn how to secure your social network, deploy it on the Internet, and keep it running and well maintained. As social networking sites rely on the participation of their users, this book helps you to structure your site in such a way so that users can easily and enjoyably contribute, thus creating a powerful social network.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Drupal 7 Social Networking
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Planning our site


We now have a basic understanding of how Drupal works, and what the various aspects of its administration section do. So let's now start planning our site!

When working on new, interesting, and exciting projects, such as a new website like this one, it is often tempting to jump right in at the deep end and start building the site. But that would be a bad idea. If we planned our website and its content carefully, then we should be able to offer our visitors a much better social network than we would if we just went straight into creating the site.

Let us first focus on the content we create for our site, as opposed to the content our users will create for us. This way we can prepare the site and its preliminary content and structure, and then begin to think about how our users are going to interact and contribute. This also allows us to try and contain the non-community aspect of the site. We set up this content now, so that we can focus on our users and build a true social...