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

Summary


In this chapter, we have quickly explored some of Drupal's modular system and used it to create two modules (as part of the same package) which added some additional functionality to our site and will add value to our social network. This included the following:

  • Creating .install files to allow the module to be installed and uninstalled, automatically creating the new content types and their fields

  • Creating the .info files to define the name, compatibility, package, and description of the modules

  • Creating .module files to add functionality to viewing maps and venues

  • Overriding some of the default Drupal output using theme suggestions

Now that we can see how powerful the modular system is within Drupal, we can investigate the system further and leverage it to add any custom functionality which we need to our site.