By jasonflenniken on

After about 4 months of development, we've launched http://www.betternetworker.com!

BetterNetworker is an online community for the network and internet marketing industry.

The original site was built on Joomla 1.0.13, along with community builder. The new community is now on Drupal 5.x.

Part of this build out involved converting all membership data, including friends, photo galleries, forum posts (from FireBoard), all content (6,000+ articles and videos), comments, statistical data, for over 16,000 users.

Since our site launch, we've gained over 1,000 members in a week.

Its full featured social network with features including:

- Articles, Videos, Podcasts, Classifieds, Groups
- Fully customized member profile layouts
- Integration with PhpBB3 (migrated over 8,000 posts from FireBoard and Joomla)
- Buddy system (User relationships)
- Points and Rewards system
- Twitter style updates (using Dodge)
- Advertising (Using the awesome OpenX platform)
- a whole ton of other stuff.

I'll be doing a full writeup on the experience, how it was built, very soon. A LOT of work was put into templating, design, getting the most out of the real estate, and making it a user friendly and modern experience, and making it perform well with the insane amount of data we're working to display on any given page.

There's a lot in store for this community, including real twitter integration, facebook integration, some ecommerce features, too much to list!

Feedback and questions are more than welcome!

Jason Flenniken

Comments

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Don't know if you noticed, but there's a huge gap at the top with Opera.

When you get your writup done, besure to file a webmaster's issue to get it on the front page. :)

Michelle

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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

jasonflenniken’s picture

jasonflenniken commented

Interesting.. what rev of opera and os are you on? I'm checking it with opera 9 on linux and dont notice any gaps.. where do you see it?

Thanks for checking it out.
Jason

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Cadence Interactive, LLC. - Design and Development

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

This is what I see on Opera 9.50 on XP (Sized down 50%):

Only local images are allowed.

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

jasonflenniken’s picture

jasonflenniken commented

just installed 9.52 on an xp machine, and I don't see the gap either... thats very very odd.
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Cadence Interactive, LLC. - Design and Development

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

Well, I just bumped to 9.52 and the gap is still there. I guess it's just weirdness with my machine, then. Not the first time I've had a problem with Opera that no one else could repro so don't worry about it, I guess.

Michelle

--------------------------------------
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.

slinky’s picture

slinky commented

I love it. I built a site with other components but not as clean and wasn't quite satisfied with it. My only hesitation in using drupal is that it took 4 months and I can guess quite a number of man hours and extra programming! Regardless, it's a beautiful result and kudos to you. It's simple and far superior to most of the junk I typically run across. Best of luck to you.

jasonflenniken’s picture

jasonflenniken commented

for the kudos!

Honestly most of the reasons this project (and well all web projects for that matter) isn't so much the technical aspect. Yeah its got some custom stuff but honestly not much. Most of the customizing is look and feel, with a few custom modules, and a few hacks to contribs.

Most of the time consuming stuff comes in the back and forth, mind changing, tweaking, experimenting, etc. For one I had started with drupals built in forums but switched to phpbb3 near the middle. Add on 2 weeks for that one decision. ;)

Also what added a lot of time was the migration of all the joomla stuff. We had 16k users, 6k of content items, and 8k of forum posts. Writing the script to do that and testing took a good portion of this.

Thanks again!
J

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Cadence Interactive, LLC. - Design and Development

manojsadh’s picture

manojsadh commented

can you plz tell me what modules you have used in your this site.

jasonflenniken’s picture

jasonflenniken commented

I'll be doing a full writeup on how this was built in the next 1-2 weeks or so. Check back when I've got that posted!

Thanks
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Cadence Interactive, LLC. - Design and Development

ColdSun’s picture

ColdSun commented

I'd definitely be very interested in knowing what methods you used to integrate phpbb3 with drupal. I noticed that you have the user point system working with forum posts, would that be included in the writeup?

jasonflenniken’s picture

jasonflenniken commented

it will be.

I used the phpbbforum module, but I did a lot of modifcations to it. For one, I took out any and all sync stuff from phpbb > to drupal, and turned off anything in phpbb that let any one modify any profile information. To me, its confusing to have someone be able to modify profile stuff in two places, and even worse to sync it. Felt there should be one place to do that.

So i modified the links to profiles, turned off that stuff, and modified the login/logout links in phpbb to all point to drupal. This simplifies things a LOT.

Also, unfortunately phpbb and drupal each have their own userids, and the syncing in that module is done via username, which is always bad to do. I modified the phpbb users table to include a drupal_id field, and that information gets populated during a sync. This way I always know their exact drupal id when I'm in phpbb3, and it makes it a heck of a lot easier to do things.

To add points, I simply added a query to the routines run in phpbb3 when someone creates a new post that adds a record to the userpoints table. It was actually very easy (since i had the drupal user id).

J
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Cadence Interactive, LLC. - Design and Development

fortunategift’s picture

fortunategift commented

I'll be waiting too :)

johnchen88’s picture

johnchen88 commented

Jason,

Nice work and we are waiting for your full writeup on the experience

XC

bobbyxdigital’s picture

bobbyxdigital commented

I love the site and all the modules and even more I love the idea of the write-up because I have little to no experience of php and me and a couple of other guys are wanting to start some sort of gaming community and any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated. So looking forward to this write-up

Again awesome work.

socialtalker’s picture

socialtalker commented

oh very nice. please consider a write up?!?

timlie’s picture

timlie commented

bump!

http://www.lievenscomputerservice.be

ColdSun’s picture

ColdSun commented

Curious as to if the case study is still planned and how detailed will it be?

Also, do you have any plans to submit your phpbb changes or post them in the write-up so others can use it?

Overall, the site is incredible and I'm amazed at how well you integrated both softwares together.

jasonflenniken’s picture

jasonflenniken commented

Yes a writeup is still in the works! I've been very busy making some big changes and as soon as I get a chance to breathe, its coming.

right now i'm in the process of implementing a new search backend and making some UI changes and other functionality changes based on user feedback, so i'll have even more insight when i get the writeup done.

thanks for the comments!

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Cadence Interactive, LLC. - Design and Development

ColdSun’s picture

ColdSun commented

Fantastic, I cant wait to read it.

tarvid’s picture

tarvid commented

Hotel Better Networking.

Check in and you will get spammed.

simongt’s picture

simongt commented

Jason, congratualtions on building a great drupal website. I only wish I had the ability to do the same. Really looking forward to seeing your project brief on this

Best Wishes,

Simon

bladze’s picture

bladze commented

We would love to learn from you. Beautiful site.

Zenko’s picture

Zenko commented

This is why Drupal is on top of the game, people like yourself creating amazing websites using drupal. I wish drupal had a higher popularity though.

Great website really enjoy it.
~~~
Daniel Gallegos
http://imzenko.com

giorgosk’s picture

giorgosk
Location Chios, Greece 🇬🇷
commented

Great work jason,

We would definitely want to read your write up

------
GiorgosK
Geoland Web development / web marketing

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GiorgosK
Web Development

marcrocs’s picture

marcrocs commented

Jason, you got one of the best drupal Social Network style sites out there. Would love to here more from you on your how to's

deedee2’s picture

deedee2 commented

Am still waiting for a case study for this site :( hope the owner can post one soon.

ColdSun’s picture

ColdSun commented

Alot of us are still waiting, however its looking less and less likely for a write-up or contributions towards the phpbbforum module. :\

michelle’s picture

michelle
she/her
Primary language English
Location Wisconsin, USA
commented

If it hasn't happened after 7 months, I don't think it's going to happen.

Doing a full writeup is hard work. I'm doing a writeup of the SN site I'm rebuilding as I do it and I keep getting tempted to just say forget it. The only thing that keeps me going is knowing how helpful it will be to people building similar sites. And, frankly, that's not a lot of motivation. LOL

Michelle

dsellers154’s picture

dsellers154 commented

I would love to see the list of modules you are using, as well as gaps you found in drupal.

David Sellers
www.net505.com :: New Media Solutions

socialtalker’s picture

socialtalker commented

this is one of my fave drupal sites, it shows what is possible without feeling overly intimidated.

Amix’s picture

Amix commented

Looks good, the design could have been better but it works and gets the job done.

RodrigoBalest’s picture

RodrigoBalest commented

Great site!

I also would like to know which modules were used to build this site, particulary for user profile/account and relationship between users.

Thanks!

RodrigoBalest’s picture

RodrigoBalest commented

How you did that multistep account creation?
Anybody knows how this can be done?

One more question: how many people worked on the project?

Thanks!!

chowzer’s picture

chowzer commented

I too would like to read Jason's writeup on his conversion project as I am also planning to move my site from phpnuke to drupal.