Knowledge Farm

Sorry in advance for the long post. I've just finished putting together the bones of my second Drupal website, http://www.kfol.org/. I've been debating whether, in its crude state, it warranted showcasing to the Drupal community. Well I decided it does, but not for the site itself, rather for the great modules it uses.

First I'll say a little about the site's purpose and structure, then I'll explain how I accomplished it with what modules. I don't know the first thing about CSS and theming, so I used the contributed Barron theme by jwolf. I think it's a fabulous theme for my purposes, but I'm well aware that my site is not likely to win the look and feel award of the year. (No offense to Barron's designer.)

Knowledge Farm is intended to be a framework for community contributed "how to instructions" classified in a folksonomy. I wanted users to have the ability to "sponsor" sets of instructions to develop them with community feedback, possibly into "open source" products. Additionally, I wanted users to be able to rate and comment on content, so that instructions with problems might be easier to identify.

The main modules that provide the framework for this are the Liquid Wiki Engine module by sorenp for the "how to's", Book modules for background info on subjects, Casetracker by Morbus Iff for sponsored instructions, Taxonomy for content organization, and Vote Up/Down by frjo for rating content. I also had to create a custom content type and input format for the wiki.

I started out with almost twice as many modules, and weeded them out as I was troubleshooting issues and rebuilding the site from scratch a few times. I still would like to use Organic Groups and Localizer, but I believe OG slow my site to a halt (30-60sec page loads versus the currently high 7secs) and Localizer seemed to break the user module. I may still try implementing these in the future.

Here is the gratuitous modules list. I am using Drupal 5.1. Thanks for checking it out.

CORE

Blog, Book, Color (enabled but not used), Comment, Contact, Drupal (enabled, not used YET), Forum, Help, Menu, Path, Profile, Search, Statistics, Taxonomy, Throttle (enabled out of superstition), Tracker, Upload.

CONTRIBUTED

ACL, Forum Access, Audio, CCK, Case Tracker, Event, Image, Image Assist, Image Filter, Liquid, Subscriptions, User Registration Notification, Actions, Comment RSS, Date API, Janode, Legal, Live Discussions, Page Array, Printable, Quote, Recent Changes, Related Links, RoleAssign, Similar Entries, Switchtheme, Taxonomy Menu, Template Filter, Text Image, Update Status, Extended User Status Notifications, Webcams, Wishlist, Captcha, Userpoints, System Info, Video, Views, Vote Up/Down, Voting API, Advanced Poll, Leech.

(And yes, that's after removing half the modules I wanted.)