We just launched the public release of a new social networking platform Lokalog.Com built on top of Drupal. It is primarily targeted towards well characterized communities with well identified users who have relatively structured needs for serious and functional content and applications. Our platform is also more concerned about security, privacy, and spam protection than the typical community platforms run by the current big players in the game. Some of the important features (ALL built over Drupal, some contributed modules, and new code developed in-house) are:
- Each user created community is a subdomain (in the style of Ning.Com, so you could think of Lokalog.Com as a Drupalite's far superior and less expensive answer to Mark Andressen's $75 million platform :-) )
- Complete user control over theme, logo, and look-and-feel of each community
- User-managed community-specific roles and fine-grained role-based access control per community
- 4 content access modes: public, private, official, and personal
- Wide and open-ended variety of content types (currently page, story, blog, forum, image, event, map, media, poll, chatroom)
- All content types are under community-specific access control
- Centrally hosted community-specific Google maps without any need for community-specific API keys
- Simplified user level Gmap map builder and map page content type
- User comments and ratings of content
- Variety of community settings and controls to manage member privacies and interactions and community characteristics
- Automatic alerts for various user and admin events
- Community hierarchies and properties
- Automatic content sharing between communities based upon community hierarchies and properties
- Community rankings and featuring of high ranked communities
- Latest tinyMCE 3.2 support
- Latest IMCE file browsing and upload support
- Variety of anti-spam and privacy features
- User's personal contact networks and additional content access control based upon author's specified personal network memberships
- Invite others feature integrated with automatic role and personal network membership on registration
- Localization (especially for Indian languages) is on its way
Drupal community is most welcome to try the platform out. If you like it, you are most welcome to stay and invite others. All core features are free for users. All comments and inputs are highly appreciated. If we see enough interest, some of our code might be worth a couple of modules with some work.
Lokalog.Com - Secure social networks
Where real communities of real people get real work done online - securely.
Caveats: We are pretty cheaply hosted at the moment, so once in a rare while you might hit the dreaded "MySql gone away" error at the site. Just reloading the page seems to get rid of it most of the time. Also, we have done almost nothing till now specifically towards performance optimization, so site response is not always at the speed of light. Please bear with us until we see some user traction that justifies an upgrade to a dedicated server.
Comments
Some give back ?
Is it possible to give something back to the Drupal Community: write up; some new modules?
Thanks in advance.
XC
Yes, some time soon...
That's the idea... as soon as we have our noses above the water :-). Comments on the site help greatly.
Hi. Sounds like great
Hi. Sounds like great functionality. Have you thought about customizing your theme? The site looks generic. I think you would be more successful if you invested in a customizing a theme (either creating a new one or altering an existing one).
We will. Thanks for the
We will. Thanks for the input. Till now we have been focused on the functionalities.
Also, we believe the root site should be plain and simple by design since we want to keep our focus on communities with structured needs rather than the scrapbook community types. Every community created on the platform gets a random initial look-and-feel from the available themes, which the creator can then customize. So the hosted communities actually look quite colorful. See, for instance: http://arpa.lokalog.com which is one of the currently hosted lokalogs (communities).
Seconded...
I have to agree here. As soon as I saw the "Garland Bar" i clicked "back."
Much appreciated...
Your inputs are highly appreciated. We'll certainly look at re-theming the root lokalog.
I can understand this reaction within the Drupal community since looking at a platform with the garland theme is almost like looking at a raw Drupal installation and most people here at drupal.org are experienced website creators who must have seen that theme a million times already. I must share, however, that we got no such reaction from the common users out there who came on board so far. The common user is fortunately not very familiar with Drupal or the default garland theme. And when a user creates a new lokalog (our name for a community), the look-and-feel of the new lokalog automatically gets initialized to a randomly selected theme out of the ones we chose to enable so far. So once the platform gets somewhat populated, roaming around the landscape of lokalogs will very rarely bring a visitor to a garland themed lokalog.
But many thanks again for your comments. We'll certainly look at changing the root lokalog theme.
That makes a lot of sense.
That makes a lot of sense. However I read your first post and all the customizations and special features, then clicked the link and saw...Garland. Having worked on some Drupal sites, I know that writing modules and custom features is a lot harder than changing the theme you're using. So my brain assumed that if I'm seeing Garland, then the special features probably aren't up to snuff either.
It's like when a Rock band puts strange requests into their touring contract. They might ask for a specific kind of sandwiches or candy in their dressing room. The reason they do this is so they have an easy way of knowing if the concert venue is organized and took care of the other, more important things (lighting, electricity) in setting up the concert. If they can't get the sandwiches right, how can you trust them to get security or safety right?
Same idea. If I'm seeing Garland, how do I know the other stuff's right?
Just explaining the thinking...
Good luck!
Same here
In fact, I said on IRC that it was disappointing to see a site with such a post about it be on Garland. I can see the point that the average user doesn't know Garland but I'd be most people reading this forum didn't look much past the "Ugh, another Garland site" stage. Of course, though, it's your users you need to please, not us. :)
Michelle
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See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out life in the Coulee Region.
More thoughts...
We hear it loud and clear. But please bear with some old school software folks for a while :-). Must get the features right before diving into UI and performance tuning. We can in fact change the root lokalog theme in exactly 2 seconds by configuring the theme just like in any of the user lokalogs. We can even program the root lokalog theme to change every day or something. But must have a user-centric reason to do any of this (and the last one probably is a very bad idea in brand building).
Some more thoughts below for your comments. We started with Drupal about a year ago and are still learning.
Our search for additional themes (and for a new theme for the root lokalog) is constrained by the need to keep certain interface related algorithms (for example, the upcoming ad serving sub-platform) as simple, low-maintenance, and robust as possible. And since we do not have much UI experience on board at the moment and are resource-constrained, we want to reuse as many of the proven GPL-ed contributed themes at drupal.org as possible. We decided to look only for themes that had the header+3-column format (left sidebar, body, right sidebar) and which did not seem to meddle with Javascript operation. We found otherwise nice themes that somehow seemed to break the Gmap views and other stuff such as fieldset collapsibility. It'd be so nice if on the themes listing page, it was possible for users to tag themes with keywords which would enable searching for themes with specific characteristics (have-leftbar, have-rightbar, javascript-safe, mellow-colors, loud-colors, etc.) along the lines of ratings of firefox add-ons at mozilla. Since we delegate theming of a user community to the user community itself, we are not looking for ONE greatest theme but MANY good idiot-proof themes.
Our primary mission is to let our user communities run their own lokalogs (think of it as a kind of alternative to Organic Groups, in fact we internally call our new system Organic Domains :-) ) with as much of the controls in their hands as possible (scoped to their own lokalog) out of all the site level Drupal administrative controls. For example, each lokalog can manage its own forums and image galleries independently of the other lokalogs and their forums. We need to do this while making the controls look easy to use for people who have no clue on managing a website or Drupal and while making sure that the site as such remains secure and safe. And all this must happen out of the same database so that site level admin can get a bird's eye view of the entire landscape any time without hassle, can search for abusive lokalogs easily, etc.
The question that we are constantly asking ourselves is: Are we succeeding in our primary mission? Any reflections on this will help us hugely. To see the key features in action, just create a lokalog and play with it. You can delete your lokalog any time, so we are not trying to inflate our user base with your lokalogs, just looking for honest literate feedback :-).
Did I mention that we have userpoints integration as well? So users earn (and lose) points for various activities. Before we make our billion dollar IPO, we'll give all users stock options in proportion of their points (just joking... or may be not...) :-).
Another upcoming feature (already beta tested) is to let a lokalog specify a mobile theme in addition to its normal theme, and let a user make a single click theme switch for better readability when she is accessing the lokalog from a small screen device. Once firefox mobile with javascript is available on more devices, the theme switch can even be automatic. We are looking for great mobile themes with a top-of-the-page primary menu (to allow user to switch back instantly when she is back at her desktop)... any suggestions are most welcome.
So many things to do, so little time... :-(
Thank you for your sharing.
Thank you for your sharing. Could you explain to me:
Which modules are you using? I am especially interested in the modules for content access control.
Thank you.
Node access modules
We use Domain Access with the multiple node access patch. Together with that we use two new custom node access modules that we call Organic Domains and Personal Networks respectively. The first allows domain-specific role-based access control for public/private/official content access modes. The second allows content access control based upon author's personal networks. These modules are not in the Drupal contributed modules repository at this time yet.
Apart from these, we use a variety of other modules for various functionalities including some we wrote. For example, we wrote a simple new Map module that allows easy creation of single map pages by users without needing access to the Gmap macro builder. We also wrote a simple Nodelock module that allows certain nodes to be flagged as node-locked, which then are allowed to be edited only by UID 1 (we use this for protecting the terms of service and such pages). These two modules (rather simple, I'm afraid) are available for immediate release if anyone is interested.
Amongst other contributed modules we use the prominent ones are IMCE, tinyMCE, and Lightbox2.
release the modules
@chaldar in the previous comment you wrote " two modules (rather simple, I'm afraid) are available for immediate release if anyone is interested." - Please release them :).
As you are listing the features it would be great if you list the modules used for lokalog in similar fashion and write if its contributed or self coded. In case module is self coded please write what it is being used for :).
Thanks.
What are the modules used for
What are the modules used for this site?
I’m not sure what to look at?
It is a social network? But just a garland theme that is empty?
If you make a user account it has content?
I have never seen captcha on a log in.
Doesn’t look to inviting, maybe you need some pictures of people or a dog.
Try and improve the look and feel
You probably should have better look and feel and also have clear message out what the site is all about. It took me some time before I can know what the site was about.
Sudhir
Gone?
Is this service gone? I'm looking for a hosted service like Ning where I don't have to keep up-to-date with software etc. Drupal seems better because I can import my existing vbulletin content ...
And now it's back ... hm ...
And now it's back ... hm ... wonder if it was scheduled maintenance or if it was unexpected downtime.
Thanks for your interest.
Thanks for your interest. This is a proof of concept site and we host this site pretty cheap. Once in a rare while the hosting service gives up for a few seconds :-(. We don't have a serious need at the moment to try to make this a well resourced site. Drupal is superb as a base platform, but we don't have the resources to take on the big guys to convert our meta platform built over Drupal into a mass use site. Instead, we are trying to use this as a platform to create infrastructures that can be used by particular groups of communities, for example, enterprises. If we have some success, we may have the resources to make some of the obvious enhancements in the system. Migration to D6 will happen once most of the dependency modules are available on D6.
Care to tell me more about your specific interest?
Regards.
Chandan