By magnito13th on

Hello everyone ..

I'm new in here, I selected to run a community on my site http://www.youtips.net using Drupal for different reasons.

So, I installed Drupal, and want to make something like this http://www.brazencareerist.com/ (one of my favourite blogs actually)

I want that a group of people (I select) will be able to post blogs, also I want groups and members displayed just like in that site .. I need to add a feel like it's a community page not a website hompage

So have you any idea where to start ? any theme to get started with ? any plugins / add ons / modules that I must install ?

I'll appreciate your help.
magnito.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

latte’s picture

latte commented

If you are new to Drupal and want to create a small social network or groups type site. You will probably want to pickup a book at Amazon.com. There are some pretty good ones out there. Aside from getting a book you will want to look at some modules like Organic Groups and friends list.

First, start with a basic feature list. Drupal does blogs right out of the box (well you have to turn on the module on the modules page). Once you have the features you want look in the downloads section and do a search for each feature. Be careful not to add to many modules as this will increase memory usage and might slow down your site.

I think buying a book is the best way to go. You will learn many best practices right from the start and not by trial and error.

Cheers and Enjoy Drupal,

Latte/

machi27’s picture

machi27 commented

someone recomended me the marinelli theme because it is very easy to theme and you have the posibilityy of differents layouts (2 or 3 col), it was not really hard to make it lock as i wanted.
I am not very sure but i think that you can handle all the user roles with no addon, giving permision to user, creating user roles, etc. for the display issue try views module. it is a bit hard to understand the way it works but once you get it it is easy and will make all the display things for you.
you will realized what else you need once you are working on it. Now most of the people must be on vacations so finding help its a bit hard, but normally people are very helpfull here.

magnito13th’s picture

magnito13th commented

Thank you guys .. I'll follow your suggestions

ppatriotis’s picture

ppatriotis commented

Hi Magnito,
I've been the lead developer @ http://www.brazencareerist.com since we first launched. Thanks a lot for the support and participation in the Brazen Careerist community. I'm always happy when techies get involved over there. A lot of our site has custom code for UI & design reasons, however, all of the basic functionality is covered by some major Drupal modules.

FeedAPI is great for bringing in RSS feeds, and, since it can create native drupal content, enables you to customize how the authors are managed and how they content is displayed. We used Content Profile with ImageAttach (part of the Image module) to get the more detailed profiles, Organic Groups for groups, and User Relationships for the Fan/Follower functionality. Views & CCK are work-horses when it comes to getting the rest of the stuff to display & act right as well.

Of course, integrating all of these and making the site look the way you want it requires a lot of tinkering and/or coding. I would suggest starting with a simple model, maybe starting with a few of the modules, and building onto it later; unless you want to spend a good amount of time working on the site before it's released.

Let me know if this helps, or if you have any other questions about the Brazen Careerist site. You can also join the Drupal group there (http://www.brazencareerist.com/group/drupal), a lot of the people there helped me out with our site.

Photis