This book uses Drupal, a powerful and extendable Content Management System (CMS), to set up and manage a social networking web site using a range of powerful and feature-rich social networking modules that are available. By using Drupal, the site can be built and extended rapidly, and changed easily, as the social network evolves and grows.
This book is packed with practical tips not only for setting up a social networking site, but also for promoting and marketing the site, as well as working with the sites' users to help the social network grow and flourish.
Chapter 1 introduces you to Drupal, social networking, and the benefits of creating a social networking site.
Chapter 2 takes you through the Drupal administration interface in addition to discussing how Drupal works. It also walks us through preparing Drupal to become a social networking site.
Chapter 3 goes through the steps of allowing our users to contribute content to the site, using modules which are built into the Drupal core.
Chapter 4 extends the user experience with enhanced customized profiles and blog themes; and enables users to log in using OpenID, which can save them the trouble of remembering another set of login details.
Chapter 5 enables users to interact with one another, as well as build and maintain relationships with each other, forming groups to enhance these relationships and improving site communication and collaboration, and providing areas for users to comment on each other's profiles and viewing the activity of the other users.
Chapter 6 looks at communicating with the users of the social network through mailing lists, theme changes and Twitter feeds, to keep them up-to-date, and improve user retention.
Chapter 7 walks through the creation of a custom module, making use of Google Maps, to illustrate how easily the social network can be extended to meet almost any need. With these skills, the features provided on the social network are no longer limited to the Drupal core and user-contributed modules.
Chapter 8 introduces you to Drupal themes to install and enable new themes, customize existing themes and walks you through the basic steps involved in creating a basic theme of your own, allowing you to provide a unique design to separate your site from the competition.
Chapter 9 shows you how to deploy your new social networking web site, and also how to maintain it to ensure that it is in tip-top condition.
Chapter 10 goes through some useful stages in promoting your site through search engine optimization, social media and advertisements, as well as some useful advice on advertising, promoting, and marketing on the web. This helps to bring back visitors to your site, and also bring in new users.
Appendix A shows you how to install the Apache web server, the PHP interpreter and MySQL database server using the WampServer package.
Drupal is a free, open source module web application framework and CMS written in PHP that can run in many environments including Windows, Mac OSX, Linux and FreeBSD. All that is required is a development environment set up on your computer such as WAMP, or XAMPP.
To deploy the web site on the Internet, you will need a web hosting account and a domain name. More information on web hosting providers and domain name registrars is provided in Chapter 9.
This book is for anyone who is interested in creating a social networking web site and would like to make use of Drupal to do so.
This book does not assume you are familiar with Drupal. However, some experience with PHP, HTML and CSS will be useful for some parts of the book, although it is not mandatory.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
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</div>When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:
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