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Drupal 7 Social Networking
Drupal 7 Social Networking

Drupal 7 Social Networking: Build a social or community website with friends lists, groups, custom user profiles, and much more

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Drupal 7 Social Networking

Chapter 2. Preparing Drupal for a Social Networking Site

Now that we have looked into social networking, how we can use Drupal as a social networking platform, and we have installed Drupal, we need to start preparing our Drupal installation for use as a social networking site!

In this chapter you will learn:

  • How Drupal works

  • How to use Drupal

  • How to use the administration tools within Drupal

  • About taxonomy and RSS within Drupal

  • More about planning your site and its content

How Drupal works


Before we start building our social networking site, it is important to take a step back and look at Drupal in a little more detail, to see how it works and the thought process behind it. Having a better understanding of this will help when planning, expanding, and managing our site!

An abstract framework

Although in the previous chapter Drupal was described as a content management system, it can more accurately be described as a content management framework. Whilst being a content management system—in that it is a system which is used for managing content within a website—Drupal places more emphasis upon the ability to easily customize and configure it.

Drupal is an abstract framework, because instead of focusing on specific types of site, and solutions to those, it focuses on more generic problems and approaches to them, which makes Drupal useful for more situations. With a little customization Drupal can be tailored more to a specific type of site.

Nodes

Nodes are what make...

Administering Drupal—An overview


Now that we have a basic understanding of how Drupal works, let's look through the administration area in more detail, making appropriate changes to settings where necessary to improve the suitability of our Drupal installation for a social networking site.

Note

It is important to note that the focus of this book is about using Drupal as a platform to create a social networking site. As a result, we won't be able to discuss each of the various features of Drupal in as much detail as deserved. We will of course cover everything that we need to, in sufficient detail, to use the features successfully for our social networking site.

Logging in

Before we can access Drupal's administrative tools, we need to log in as an administrator. The login box is on the left-hand side of our Drupal installation (http://localhost/drupal7/). Let's log in with the user account we created during the installation process:

Once logged in, we have access to the administrative toolbar...

Content types and taxonomy: A detailed look


In the previous versions of Drupal, there was a very popular suite of modules called CCK (Content Construction Kit), the main purpose of which was to make it easier for administrators to create new customized content types, with more options and fields available to them. Much of the Content Construction Kit code has now been brought into the core Drupal 7 installation, negating the need to install the module. As a result of this, the core taxonomy module has been updated to make use of this feature, to make it easier to define how content can be categorized.

Tip

What is taxonomy?

Taxonomy is a powerful module which makes it easy for us to group and categorize our content. This could be by entering a keyword, a series of keywords, or selecting a category from a drop-down list. Categorized content can then be aggregated and displayed together through useful lists of content.

Let's have a look at customizing content types and how taxonomy links into...

Planning our site


We now have a basic understanding of how Drupal works, and what the various aspects of its administration section do. So let's now start planning our site!

When working on new, interesting, and exciting projects, such as a new website like this one, it is often tempting to jump right in at the deep end and start building the site. But that would be a bad idea. If we planned our website and its content carefully, then we should be able to offer our visitors a much better social network than we would if we just went straight into creating the site.

Let us first focus on the content we create for our site, as opposed to the content our users will create for us. This way we can prepare the site and its preliminary content and structure, and then begin to think about how our users are going to interact and contribute. This also allows us to try and contain the non-community aspect of the site. We set up this content now, so that we can focus on our users and build a true social...

Starting to build our site


Now that we have a basic plan of our site's static content, we can start to build the static elements of our site.

Using taxonomy

Let's start with taxonomy. Since this is a way of categorizing content, it makes sense to set this up before we start creating content.

Creating the vocabulary

We need to go to Structure | Taxonomy | Add vocabulary to define a group of terms to categorize our content with. Enter a name of Dinosaur Breed and a description of specific breed of dinosaur, before clicking the Save button. We will use this to categorize content which relates to specific breeds of dinosaur:

With the vocabulary created, we now need to add terms to it, using the add terms link:

Here we can add the various breeds of dinosaur to the vocabulary using the create term form:

Now that we have a new vocabulary with terms associated with it, we need to link it to the appropriate content types. We need to go to Structure | Content types | Basic page | Manage fields.

From here...

Summary


In this chapter, we looked at Drupal in more detail, particularly at how to use its administration options, which should help us in building our site. This should prove to be a useful reference point in future. We also planned some of the static content for our site, and started to create this content for it.

Our Drupal site is now ready to become a social networking site! We can now move forward with more interactive and dynamic features.

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Key benefits

  • Step-by-step instructions for putting together a social networking site with Drupal 7
  • Customize your Drupal installation with modules and themes to match the needs of almost any social networking site
  • Allow users to collaborate and interact with each other on your site
  • Requires no prior knowledge of Drupal or PHP; but even experienced Drupal users will find this book useful to modify an existing installation into a social website

Description

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.

Who is this book 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.

What you will learn

  • Build a social networking site from the ground up using Drupal 7
  • Use a combination of features, modules, and simple customization to allow user interaction, contributions, and communication
  • Import content from the Internet to your site using the Aggregator module
  • Create user profiles, set up roles and permissions, and handle security settings
  • Use Drupal s modular system to create modules to add functionality
  • Customize the look and feel of your site by enabling and installing new themes, ensuring that your site is distinctive
  • Deploy and maintain your social networking site on the Internet using the maintenance mode, reports, and cron to keep everything running smoothly
  • Recover from virus attacks and hacking attempts on your social network by making and maintaining regular backups, in case the worst should happen
  • Promote and market your social network using advertisements, advertising networks, other social networks, and search engine optimization
  • Let your users contribute to the site, from those who wish to add a little content to those who wish to help run the site on a daily basis
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Table of Contents

12 Chapters
Drupal and Social Networking Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Preparing Drupal for a Social Networking Site Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
User Content: Contributions, Forums, and Blogs Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Users and Profiles Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Enabling User Interaction Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Social Seasoning Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Module Development: Rapidly Improve your Social Network Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
How We Can Design Our Site Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Communicating with Our Users Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Deploying and Maintaining Your Social Network Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Easing Growing Pains Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
Promotion, SEO, User Retention, and Monetization Strategies Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.7
(3 Ratings)
5 star 33.3%
4 star 0%
3 star 66.7%
2 star 0%
1 star 0%
Michael B. Apr 09, 2015
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
The definitive guide to building a Drupal social network.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
marlo_42 Jun 16, 2012
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
I am an experienced Drupal site builder. What I want is a book that is densely packed with specific technical and practical information about implementing Facebook and Twitter and SEO. This is NOT that book. This book is a newbie Drupal book that uses some social features as examples.Full Disclosure: I have not read this book. I encourage anyone who has read it to write a review, and then we can label this review as "not helpful."
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Saf Dec 18, 2011
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 3
This is book concentrated on a UI kind of development with some good examples with codes but it doesn't explain enough from a programming side nor it did touch enough in modules. It is good buy if you want to add a few more tips to your collection.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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