Drupalfun.com – social networking made easy

Mission & Philosophy

Our mission:
"Provide a meeting ground for Drupallers. A place to get to know eachother, help eachother out, find a job and where all participants can earn some AdSense revenue in the process."

The main idea whilst building this site, was to use only user contributed, out of the box modules. All features on the site are available through existing modules. Since it is not always that easy to set up a comprehensive social networking site with Drupal, I wanted to share my fully integrated approach, so I wrote down every single step, together with more then 100 screenshots. This formed the "Drupal 6: Ultimate Community Site Guide", which is available for download at http://book.drupalfun.com or as a paperback at Amazon.
Let's take a look at some of the key features of Drupalfun.

Profiles with Panels

The backbone of the site are the user profiles. The extensive profiles are built with a panel and display a lot of information about the user, such as profile information, photo gallery, video gallery, friends, the user's showcase, etc. It's important to note that I chose to keep the “profile” and “my account” seperated, like for instance on Facebook. I feel there is a need for such an extensive profile page with “public” (or let's say interesting) information, whilst account settings can be kept in a less prominent place.

Key modules in making profiles are content profile and panels.

The profiles include a video gallery, which can be embedded from any external video site such as youtube. All the users also have one photo gallery, where they can upload their own pictures. Another interesting feature is the worldmap on the profile. Users can either specify their address and it will be geocoded to the map, or they can pinpoint it on the map theirselves.

Social Networking Features

The social networking features on Drupalfun include:

• private messaging
• groups
• shoutbox
• “become friends” & “become a fan”
• forum, autosuggesting relevent questions
• “what are you doing”
• user activity,, for instance “John just commented on Jane's profile”
• voting (Plus1 on showcases and Fivestar on profiles)
• “spread the word”
• subscribe to any content
• earn “brain cells” by posting tutorial and answering questions on the forum
• on each post, the AdSense is shared for 50% with the poster

Conclusion

It is possible to set up a social networking site with Drupal 6, using only out of the box modules. The first time I set up a site like this, it took me a lot of time glueing all the forum posts together, and I recognised the need for a step by step, beginning to end, guide to set up a site like this. From this idea came Drupalfun.com, which was developed together with the full case study ebook. I hope you enjoy the site.