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

Leverage other features


Established social networks such as Facebook and Twitter provide additional nuggets of social interaction which we can integrate on our own site, including:

  • Like this page on Facebook

  • Tweet this page on Twitter

  • Find us on Facebook

  • Embedding our latest tweets

Let's look at how we can integrate these into our site.

Like this on Facebook

Many websites now display a link to allow users to indicate that they like a particular page and notify their friends on Facebook of this page. This feature also indicates the total number of users who like the page, and if any of those are the user's friends, it will display their names and / or photographs.

Enabling PHP in content blocks

We will embed the Facebook like button in the Drupal footer; however we need to make use of PHP in the block for this to work. By default, Drupal 7 does not allow PHP code to be entered into blocks, so we need to enable this module from the module list:

Once enabled (by clicking Save), we now have a link to...