Social networking modules in drupal hosting

Posted by jck.kln on April 7, 2008 at 1:57pm

Hi!
I'm going to create a Social Network based on Drupal. It's my first time that I use Drupal and I'm impressed with the high quantity of modules. There are a lot of modules for each subject (i.e. image gallery, blog, etc). Now I've got a problem because I don't know which are the most useful modules to build a Social Network.

Could you tell me which are the indispensable modules to create a Social Network with Drupal? or which is the best module in a concrete subject?

hosting

Thanks in advance.

Posted by IceCreamYou on April 8, 2008 at 9:53pm

I started with Drupal last September. My only previous web experience was the relatively simple HTML and CSS it took to create www.icecreamyou.com .

I spent six months with Drupal building www.babelup.com. I built it alone, but it mostly took six months because I had no idea what I was doing. So I can appreciate what it means to get huge pointers rather than having to spend days searching through all the modules. It was a gigantic project, a very feature-rich "social network for social activism."

This past weekend I built my third Drupal site (the second, though the highest-traffic one, was a relatively inconsequential task that I did for a group of people I work with). I built it alone from scratch in about 36 hours of work (which was possible because I used no custom modules and no custom theming apart from CSS tweaks). It's not quite complete because I discovered after I took it live Sunday night that using certain parts of the site was tedious, but it gives you an idea of how powerful a tool Drupal can be once you learn enough to use it effectively. ) The new site, in case you're interested, is BMusic: music.babelup.com. It lets you share playlists with people (not the music itself - that would be illegal - but I'm going to add links to Amazon Music).

I'm working on a write-up of how I went from BabelUp to BMusic. The main lessons learned are from a technical perspective: knowing what modules you're going to install ahead of time, configuring everything at once in a sensible order, not overcrowding the page with blocks. But don't ignore marketing - otherwise the site just sits there, as BabelUp is doing largely because I don't have the time to fully maintain it.

The general trend is that people who run production sites without doing a lot of development first use last-gen systems because they're stable and well-tested. People who don't need a lot of complex functionality immediately (like with personal blogs) or people who want to test and develop on the new "toys" use the newest versions of everything. So social networking sites running on Drupal are mostly still on 5.x.

Social networking modules in drupal hosting want to test

You should install a module DCL importer, which imports contacts from your email account i.e. gmail's Yahoo's and MSN. I don't know if it provides functionality to alter this module in best way but if it do than I can write some simple steps.

1) Make This Drupal form a Multistep Form and Disable its redirection, you can do this simply put

$form['#redirect'] = FALSE;
$form['#multistep'] = TRUE;

2) In first Step you will Find People in your contact list and it stores complete list in $SESSION, and in 2nd step you can find these contact list in drupal's user list.

Note. Actually this module is contributed module which ties with Invite module to invite people.
But I think it will be worthy if you use this as just store the list people you know.

3) if you want to add them directly you can just hack code form buddylist to add them directly and for remaining contacts you can either skip them or invite them.

Thanks
Blue Moon

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