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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.

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Drupal 7 Social Networking
Sep, 2011 | 328 pages
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Table of Contents (22 chapters)
Drupal 7 Social Networking
Drupal 7 Social Networking
Credits
Credits
About the Author
About the Author
Acknowledgement
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Drupal and Social Networking
Drupal and Social Networking
Social Networking: An introduction
Why not join or use an existing social network?
Drupal
Drupal as a social networking platform
Alternatives to Drupal
DinoSpace!
Installing Drupal
Summary
2
Preparing Drupal for a Social Networking Site
Preparing Drupal for a Social Networking Site
How Drupal works
Administering Drupal—An overview
Content types and taxonomy: A detailed look
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
Managing comments
Forums
Setting up and using blogs
Collaborative writing
Polls
Contributions in the form of pages
Uploaded files
Roles
Summary
4
Users and Profiles
Users and Profiles
What are we going to do and why?
Getting set up
Users, roles, and permissions
Creating customizable user profiles
Globally recognized avatars: Enabling Gravatars
Tracking user activity
User centric home page
Account settings
Summary
5
Enabling User Interaction
Enabling User Interaction
DinoSpace!: A review
Preparation: Installing the modules
Relationships
Related user activity stream
Contacting users
Groups
Commenting on user profiles
Summary
6
Social Seasoning
Social Seasoning
Let's prepare our modules
Encouraging discussion with Disqus
Sharing content with AddThis
Leverage other features
Summary
7
Module Development: Rapidly Improve your Social Network
Module Development: Rapidly Improve your Social Network
Dinosaur-friendly venues
Useful resources
Building our module
Module in action
Summary
8
How We Can Design Our Site
How We Can Design Our Site
Drupal themes
The basics of creating a theme
Summary
9
Communicating with Our Users
Communicating with Our Users
Getting started
A look back
Mailing lists
Using content blocks to get our message across
Using theme customisations to indirectly communicate with our users
Inactive users: Please come back
Summary
10
Deploying and Maintaining Your Social Network
Deploying and Maintaining Your Social Network
Installing the modules
Security
Deploying
Maintenance
Summary
11
Easing Growing Pains
Easing Growing Pains
Basic performance tips
NoSQL options
Can't someone else do it?
Using content delivery networks
Code improvements and custom modules
Server performance and configuration
Scaling our resources
Adding redundancy to our setup
Keep an eye out…
Summary
12
Promotion, SEO, User Retention, and Monetization Strategies
Promotion, SEO, User Retention, and Monetization Strategies
Promotion and marketing
Search Engine Optimization
User retention
Monetization options
Final tips: Web stats
Modules to consider
Summary
Setting up a Local Development Environment
Setting up a Local Development Environment
WampServer for Windows
Linux
Mac
Summary
Installed Modules
Installed Modules
Chapter 1 to Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7 to Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11 to Chapter 12
Index
Index

About the Author

Michael Peacock (www.michaelpeacock.co.uk) is a web developer and Zend Certified Engineer from Newcastle, UK with a degree in Software Engineering from the University of Durham.

After working as Managing Director and Lead Developer overseeing the development team at the web agency he co-founded almost five years ago, Michael stepped back from the business and now acts as Senior/Lead Web Developer on the telemetry project for Smith Electric Vehicles.

In October 2010, Michael presented his thoughts on specific web application architectures at the popular PHP North West conference, and has presented to the PHP North East user group on automated deployment systems and to North East technical community group Super Mondays on Jenkins Continuous Integration.

Michael loves working on web related projects, and is currently incubating a number of ideas for launch through his latest venture, Central Apps Limited (www.centralapps.co.uk).

He is the author of Drupal 7 Social Networking, PHP 5 Social Networking, PHP 5 E-Commerce Development, Drupal 6 Social Networking, Selling online with Drupal e-Commerce and Building Websites with TYPO3. Michael acted as technical reviewer for other publications like Mobile Web Development and Drupal for Education and E-Learning.

You can follow Michael on Twitter: www.twitter.com/michaelpeacock or find out more about him through his blog: www.michaelpeacock.co.uk.

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