Preface

This book uses Drupal, a powerful and extendable Content Management System (CMS), to set up and manage a social networking website. This is achieved using a range of powerful and feature-rich social networking modules that are available, as well as creating a few of our own along the way. By using Drupal, the site can be built and extended rapidly and changed as the needs of our users and site change and evolve.

This book is packed with practical tips, not only for setting up a social networking site, but also for promoting and marketing the site, working with the site's users to help the social network grow, and preparing for growth so that our users get a reliable, enjoyable experience on the site.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Drupal and Social Networking, looks into the basics, dealing with various social networking concepts, and also why you may wish to create a social network. You will start by looking at the concepts of social networking, Content Management Systems, and Drupal. Then you will be guided to install Drupal, look at its features, and see how it works.

Chapter 2, Preparing Drupal for a Social Networking Site, looks at Drupal in more detail, particularly at how to use its administration options, which should help you in building your site. This should prove to be a useful reference point in future. You'll be able to plan some of the static content for your site, and start to create content for it.

Chapter 3, User Content: Contributions, Forums, and Blogs, focuses very much on content; with these features in place you can now look at users, their profiles, and allow them to connect with one another to create a powerful social network.

Chapter 4, Users and Profiles, teaches how to manage users, roles, and their permissions. It talks about Gravatars and how to enable them. You'll learn how users can track the activity of each other and how to extend user profiles. Settings and rules for users will be talked about and you'll also learn how to give authenticated users a more relevant home page.

Chapter 5, Enabling User Interaction, explains how users can build relationships and friendships within the site, and how they can communicate with each other. With this, you will learn how to create a social site which is truly a network using Drupal.

Chapter 6, Social Seasoning, sprinkles in third-party social features to the site, including sharing content on other social networks, and using more advanced comment features from services such as Disqus.

Chapter 7, Module Development, rapidly teaches the basics of the Drupal 7 module system, through the creation of a suite of modules including a new bespoke content type and a map. This covers module development, extending the default content types, and allowing modules to interact with one another.

Chapter 8, Designing Our Site, discusses the default themes available to us, how we can customize it, where we can get new themes from, and the basics of the Drupal theming system. This provides the ground work for making your social network look the part.

Chapter 9, Communicating with Our Users, helps administrators communicate directly with users through e-mail, contact forms, and using the theme and reminders.

Chapter 10, Deploying and Maintaining Our Social Network, details the processes involved in taking a site from your local computer to the web. This discusses concepts including hosting, domain names, and the methods used to get the site running online. Once the site is online, it discusses how to maintain the social network.

Chapter 11, Easing Growing Pains, provides help and advice for scaling the social network and how to prepare with a large number of users. These tips speed up the site and show how to make the site more reliable when under load.

Chapter 12, Promotion, SEO, User Retention, and Monetization Strategies, looks into effectively marketing and promoting websites and social networking websites with online marketing techniques, search engine optimization, and user retention strategies. You'll also be looking briefly into how you may wish to monetize your site.

What you need for this book

For this book you will need:

• A local development environment (see Appendix A)

• A text editor, such as Crimson Editor (http://www.crimsoneditor.com/)

• An FTP client to deploy your site online, such as FileZilla (http://filezilla-project.org/)

• An SSH client if you wish to maintain your site using the command line (http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/)

Who this book is for

This book is aimed at anyone looking to create their own social networking website, including:

• Businesses: Building a social network around a product or service can improve your company profile and increase customer loyalty, while an internal social network gives you employees a place to keep resources, discuss ideas, raise concerns, and keep up-to-date on company policies.

• Hobbyists: Create a community around your hobbies and interests; create a local or distributed user group.

• Organizations and charities: Raise your profile, promote your events, services, and fundraisers, and get help from the community in organizing them.

• Families: For large families based across the country or across the globe, keep up-to-date with everyone, and let everyone know what you are up to.

You don't need any experience of Drupal or PHP to use this book. If you are a Drupal user you will find this book a great way to rapidly tailor an existing installation into a socially orientated website.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "To make use of friendly or clean URLs, the mod_rewrite module for Apache, and the ability to use .htaccess files is required."

A block of code is set as follows:

<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-count="vertical" data-via="dino_space">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=
  <?php 
  
    $path = isset($_GET['q']) ? $_GET['q'] : '<front>';
    $link = url($path, array('absolute' => TRUE));
    
    echo urlencode( $link );
  ?>
  &amp;layout=standard&amp;show_faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;
    action=like&amp;font&amp;colorscheme=light&amp;height=80"

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

sudo apt-get install apache2

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "This page contains download links for Drupal Core, Installation Profiles, Themes, Translations, and Modules ".

Note

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tip

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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