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

Maintenance


From time to time we may wish to perform some maintenance on our site; let's look at three common ways of maintaining our installation:

  • Automated maintenance: Cron

  • Making changes and updating our site

  • Analysing Drupal reports and performing maintenance accordingly

Cron

Cron is the automated execution of tasks by our server. Many Drupal modules perform regular maintenance tasks (for example, pruning log files), by using cron these tasks can be automatically performed at specific intervals.

Setting up cron jobs is quite technical, and depends on your hosting provider too, as not all hosting providers allow cron jobs to run. You should contact your web host for more information on setting up a cron job.

The Drupal handbook online contains more information about setting up cron. http://drupal.org/cron.

Looking up the secure cron URL

If you are comfortable with setting up a cron job, you will need to generate a secure cron URL from Drupal. This is a web address which when called by our cron...