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

Drupal as a social networking platform


Because of the way Drupal is structured, it is very flexible to adapt to the needs of a wide range of different websites. Permission to perform various actions such as creating content, writing a comment, writing a blog post, and so on can all be assigned to different roles within Drupal, be it the role of an administrative user or the role of a standard user who is logged in. This means that we can grant the permission to contribute and help manage the content of the website to the users of the website.

Many social-oriented features are included with Drupal "out of the box" (without the need to download extra files or modules) including:

  • Blogs

  • Forums

  • Contact forms

  • Content Construction Kit

  • Collaborative content through the Book module and also through permissions allowing users to edit different types of content, such as pages

Drupal's modular framework, as mentioned earlier, allows new features to be installed at a later time. There are many modules available designed to enhance Drupal's ability to work and act like a social network. It also means that once our site is up and running, we can easily expand it at a later date with new modules to add extra functionality. Such modules include:

  • Views

  • Organic groups

  • Extended profiles

  • Blog themes

  • Gravitar

  • OpenID

  • Janrain Engage (formerly RPX)

With Drupal being a Content Management System, we also have the advantage that a part of our site could be controlled and managed by us, as is typical with most websites, and other areas can be contributed to by the community.