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Drupal 6 Social Networking

By :
Book Image

Drupal 6 Social Networking

By:

Overview of this book

<p>Drupal is ideally equipped to be used as a base system for creating a custom social networking site like Facebook and MySpace. While these large social networks have their place, niche social networking web sites can help promote businesses, products, projects, and hobbies of any nature.<br /><br />This book 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 decide!<br /><br />This book will take you from the very basics of both Drupal and Social Networking right through to more complicated aspects, like creating your own custom design and features for the site. With no experience of Drupal required, the book will introduce you to this award-winning CMS and carefully take you through the steps to create a social networking site from it. As the book progresses, you will learn how to add to and expand your social networking site, adding more features and adding value for your users, and how to make your users feel part of the community. Social networking web sites rely on their users contributing to the site, and this book helps you structure a site in a way users can easily and enjoyable contribute to the site &acirc;&euro;&ldquo; creating a powerful social network.<br /><br />The book begins with the fundamental concepts of a Social Networking site, and how we can use Drupal to create such a site. It then goes through installing Drupal before looking at expanding the out-of-the-box feature set with third-party modules designed for Social Networking. Once the web site is running, it looks at securing the Social Network, deploying it on the Internet, and keeping it running and well maintained. It doesn't stop there however; as Social Networks rely on their user base to run and become successful, the book also covers marketing the Social Network using Search Engine Optimization, Online Marketing, and a range of new Social Media.</p>

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Drupal 6 Social Networking
Feb, 2009 | 312 pages
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Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Drupal 6 Social Networking
Drupal 6 Social Networking
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Drupal and Social Networking
Drupal and Social Networking
Social networking
Why create a social network instead of joining an existing one?
DinoSpace!
Drupal as a social networking platform
Installing Drupal
Configuring Drupal
Summary
2
Preparing Drupal for a Social Networking Site
Preparing Drupal for a Social Networking Site
How Drupal works
Administering Drupal: an overview
Planning our site
Starting to build our site
Summary
3
User Content: Contributions, Forums, and Blogs
User Content: Contributions, Forums, and Blogs
Our site
User roles: an important note
Drupal modules
Comments
Forums
Blogs
Collaborative writing
Polls
Contributions in the form of pages
Uploaded files/attachments
Automatically generated content
Social aggregation
Roles
Summary
4
Users and Profiles
Users and Profiles
What are we going to do and why?
Install the modules
Users, roles, and permissions
Adding special properties to user profiles
Tracking user activity
Settings and rules
Blog themes
Open ID
Summary
5
Enabling User Interaction
Enabling User Interaction
Dino Space: a review
Installing the modules
Relationships
User activities
Profile comments with the Guestbook module
Contacting users
Groups
Summary
6
Communicating with our Users
Communicating with our Users
Getting started
Communicating on an individual basis
Mailing lists
Direct contact
Content blocks
Theme customizations for communication
Summary
7
Improving our Network with Custom Modules
Improving our Network with Custom Modules
Our module
Drupal's modular system
Creating our module
Useful APIs
Summary
8
Designing our Site
Designing our Site
Drupal themes
Customizing the default theme
Creating a theme: The basics
Summary
9
Deploying and Maintaining our Social Networking Site
Deploying and Maintaining our Social Networking Site
Installing the modules
Security
Deploying
Maintenance
Backing up
Restoring
Summary
10
Promoting our Site
Promoting our Site
Online advertising
Newsletters
Marketing materials
Social marketing
Search Engine Optimization
Monetizing your site
Summary
Installing WAMP
Installing WAMP
Installing WampServer
WampServer overview
Configuring WampServer
Summary
Index
Index

About the Reviewers

Ashok Modi is a talented web application programmer who has worked for both large and small tech companies in Toronto and the United States.

Ashok works in Java, PHP, C/ C++/Objective C, SQL and Ruby on Rails. He holds an Honours B.Sc. in computer science from the University of Toronto where he specialized in Software Engineering.

Alan Doucette is a partner of KOI (koitech.net), a web development company. He is passionate about PHP and open source software. He is also very active in the web community and a contributor of Drupal. His constantly changing blog is kept at http://alanio.net.

Thanks go to the awesome Drupal community for all their daily hard work creating great open source software. I would also like to thank my business partner, Ben Davis, for his support and dealing with a Drupal fanatic.

Dan Kurtz is an Internet Strategist and Lead Developer at Trellon LLC, a web development company specializing in open-source social media and content management. Since 2006, he has produced dozens of Drupal sites, helped plan a series of DrupalCamp unconferences, and created the Teleport module for system administrators. When he's not focused on Drupal, he is usually acting in plays or hunched over a sewing machine.

Dan has a BA in Cognitive Science from the University of California, Berkeley and a Master's of Information Studies from University of Toronto. He currently lives in Oakland, California, and maintains an online headquarters at http://brickswithoutclay.com.

David Kent Norman has pursued a lifetime of quality education and expertise in technology. His various career pursuits in the past eight years have focused on web-based content management and Drupal. He holds a Bachelor's degree in business, Master's degree in Management Information Systems and a Ph.D. in Instructional Technology.

He published and managed a Content Management System (CMS) with developers from around the world. His CMS was used as the basis for PHP-Nuke and other related projects with more than 8 million downloads. Since he left managing his own CMS project, he has been heavily involved with the Drupal CMS.

Today, David is one of few permanent members of the Drupal Association's General Assembly, a distinction only granted by an election process of peers. In his time with Drupal, David has written or contributed to over 75 modules and themes now freely available for download from Drupal.org. Since 2006, he has been a mentor for the Google Summer of Code program, which brings in new talent to Drupal every year. He was also a reviewer of Learning Drupal 6.

Josh McCormack is the owner of InteractiveQA, a social network development company. InteractiveQA uses Drupal to create highly interactive sites that engage visitors to come often, stick around, and generate content. Past and present clients include SonyBMG, Audobon, AsiaSociety.org, Petstyle.com, and others.

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