Chapter 3. User Content: Contributions, Forums, and Blogs

We now have our Drupal installation ready to become a social networking site! One key element of social networking sites is user-generated content and that is what we will look at in this chapter. Drupal contains a number of core modules (modules which come with Drupal as opposed to modules written by others which we need to download and install), which allow our site to support user-generated content. In this chapter, you will learn the following:

• About user comments

• Enabling and managing user contributions as well as uploaded files

• Setting up and managing discussion forums

• Giving each of your users a blog with the Blog module

• Facilitating wiki-based collaborative writing with the Book module

• Running polls with the Polls module

We are also going to plan the types of user we are going to have on our site, and plan the roles and permissions they will have. Let's start by having a look at how these relate to our site.