By FJDorr on

So with the help of Drupal I'm trying to build up a social network site and of course you will run into Organic Groups and Buddylist.

Since I'm new to Drupal I have some questions about these modules that you guys just might be able to answer.

Organic groups is a module that allows you and the users to create a group in which users can come together and create their own webpage and exchange user information and be able to easily see who belongs to the group of friends and so on. This group is a social network on it's own and the users form a group of friends as you would see in normal life.

Buddylist allows an user to add another user to his buddylist and is then better able to follow that buddy. It makes it easier to see the profile of the users to see if new content is added. The buddylist is not really a social network in the sense that there isn't a gathering, the users just browse the website on their own.

Both modules aren't really related. A buddylist does not consist of all the members in a group and the members of a group aren't all ones member list. They do show some kind of overlap since both group your friends to make it convenient for the user to check up on his/her friends.

OK these short descriptions of the two modules show what I think and known of the possibilities of both modules. I definitely want the functionality of organic groups in my social network since the current solution for what I'm designing is faulty and undermines the entire idea of group work (sorry for the vague description). But when I install and configure the organic groups, what would than be the added value of the buddylist? I'm not really sure if it has added value at all.

So what in short is my question? Well I want to know if the things I wrote about the two modules are correct or if I'm missing some important stuff. I started working with Drupal a couple of days ago and am starting to get the hang of it but please in your replies never think "ow he must have though of that so it's not worth mentioning", I could use all comments :) So is my analysis correct, what is the specific value of the modules if you use both and, specifically, what is the value of the buddylist module when using organic groups?

Finally a small question that I have not dug into but want to ask it anyway. User profiles in my social network will consist of information that is changing every once in a while and updates on this are important for the group. So I'm wondering if there is a possibility to send an automatic mail to the group members when somebody alters some specific parts of his/her user profile.

Well a lot of text and I hope you'll be willing to help me. Let me just say that Drupal is great to work with :) A breeze compared to Joomla.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

stephit’s picture

stephit commented

In most social networking sites, people have personal "buddylists" (or a friends list) of people they are personally connected to. This is different from the "group" of people that might join an organic group. I think that both are complimentary and you should install and use both. I expect to have a friends list now when I go to a "social networking" website.

I have both buddylist and groups running on the new version of my website. I am still tinkering with some aspects of the groups and not many people are signed up yet, but you are welcome to take a look around and see how I set it up:

http://www.magicmastermind.com

misty3’s picture

misty3 commented

Hi slaphappy,
You have got a bold and beautiful site design.
I need to register to see it deeper though :-)

A small question if you are using OG 5x

The option to have "Group by content type" in Group Home Page settings have
vanished from the latest OG versions - could you suggest IF IT IS POSSIBLE
to have this back ?

Best regards

alsears’s picture

alsears commented

I have ran into this same problem. Basically what I want to do is to invite a bunch of users into the site, and be able to have them automatically be registered on an Organic Group that I manage.

A major part of the functionality we are hoping for in our system is the ability for user transfer E-mail list from YahooGroups to Organic Groups and manage those lists using OG2List. The problem is that I don’t see an easy way for users to do this. Below is my understanding of the current options for doing this (and related problems).

1. Use Drupal Import Function and add users to OG groups during import. Problems: What if we add groups after the user import and we want to bulk add say 1,000 users (some already registered and some not)? We can’t give regular users access to the user import function.
2. Use Invite function from OG group. Problem: We tried this, and users click the link, and must sign in or create an account first. After registering, it doesn’t take them back to the original group subscription link. Most users assume that by registering, that automatically subscribed them to the group, but it didn’t. The result is that 90% of the users invited don’t actually join the group even if they register
3. Use the OG add members function for all Drupal users. Problem: we have several thousand users, and identifying the correct 500 users out of that list takes too long. In addition, we cannot allow regular users to have access to automatically subscribe our whole user list to their group.

One option would be to to patch the OG Invite functionality. A second option would be to create a separate Group Import functionality. The third option would be to have buddylist groups create an organic group.

The reason it is important is that we expect that the main way our community will grow will be by people creating groups and adding or inviting others into our system through that group.

Andrew Sears