www.bangalorr.com is an exclusive community to bring together all of those who use the Bangalore Outer ring road(ORR) on daily basis. Bangalore,India is a well known hub for education,Healthcare,Business,IT, tourist and shopping. The city has one of the highest density of software professionals in the world. Bangalore ORR has the highest density of MNC's, schools, hospitals, shopping malls and thus one of the key factors driving the growth of Bangalore.

Goal:
The goal was to bring everything that a thriving community portal needs. Active discussion forums, polls, classifieds, Jobs and many more focusing Areas of Bangalore falling under the ORR. We wanted a single platform for all of those who study/live/work in same location.

Case study:
Drupal6 or Drupal 7 ?
After assessing drupal6 and drupal7, we felt that drupal7 is now stable and has the support of many of the modules which were earlier only supported on drupal6.A checklist of must have modules were made and the availability of these modules on drupal 7 confirmed that we are good to go with drupal7

Key Modules:
views - This is a core module for building any drupal based website.
AdvancedForum - To be frank, we wanted to build a BB and we evaluated other specialist forum such as phpBB,vBulletin and simple machine. Our prior experience with drupal+ future scope for integrating forums with other non BB feature made us choose drupal.
AuthorPane - Just to provide the functionality similar to other BB
ClassifiedAds - This is one great module which saved our time and effort(we wanted to write a custom module just like this)
Rules - Very powerful module. helps you to configure rules(example: user points,forum discussions etc.) which help in automated functioning of the website.
Captcha - A must have for any community driven website. First level of check to ensure the sanity of the content
Userpoints - To reward the users for their contribution.

SEO related Modules:
SEO Checklist - Not really a module, but as it says its a very handy checklist for tracking what is pending
XMLSitemap - automates the sitemap building as the content changes dynamically for website
Google Analytics - This could have been done manually as well, felt that the module is well integrated
Page title - Very important for SEO
Pathauto - Automatically assigns names to url that makes more sense. SEO friendly

Other than that we did evaluate below features as well(to be part of the next iteration)
Facebook integration
Referral system - Inviting friends etc.
shopping cart - redeeming accumulated user points
Location modules - Map based interface
Newsletter - periodic updates,digests of forum topics etc(based on user preference)
We are pretty happy with the performance of the website so far. yet to see the how performance scales as the content and web hits grow rapidly.

Theme and styling:
In-house design, simplistic and intuitive keeping in sync with the goal of this website. CSS,SQL, HTML and scripting were used to create a final website, which is now live and slowly growing

Drupal community:
Alot of credit goes to powerful and always helpful drupal community. During various stages of this project we found solutions to most of our problems via the excellent community support. A big thank you for everyone who made it possible to shape this website.

Conclusion:
This was our first drupal 7 project and we were pretty amazed with the end result. Concept to creation of website hardly took couple of weeks.

Drupal today is more mature and as everyone knows, flexible and powerful to the core. Having worked with Drupal6 on our previous projects we were sure that drupal projects are very scalable and customizable.