Voice acting community with Drupal
www.voiceacting.co.uk is a community and resource site for amateur voice over and related hobbies, including Flash, mods, machinima and podcasting. It's been about a year I think since we changed over and it's been a learning experience so I wanted to share what I've done from a non coder's perspective. I've not listed every module I have on there, just run through some of the main ones,
Previously the site was powered via wordpress/bbpress but lacked support for some of the features I wanted to introduce.
The main feature was the voice actor's directory a searchable listing of amateur voice actors, which links to their onsite resume. This was largely achived via views for the listing, then content profile, flexifield, an embedded media field for the resume.
Once I got that working I created a prouction listing so member's could create entries for finished projects, since there is a critique section in the forum this isn't used but one area I am happy with is node reference, so if the creator credits people via their site username it will link their profile and resume. After a request from someone who wanted to list their production rather than voice over skills I created a studio listing in the same way.
A big thrust for the site is the articles, tutorials and interviews. The main thing here are the taxonomy menus which help sort content quickly and easily.
After some requests I also added private messages (Privatemsg), Newsletter ( Simplenews), an friendslists ( friendlist).
Since users had trouble with the default input system, I added supprt for BBcode and FCKeditor. I did try a number of WYSIWYG modules, but this one worked the best for me.
To try and increase user activity I added account reminder, poormanscron to handle cron jobs on my shared hosting, pathauto to make cleaner URLs, and Backup and Migrate to make backups ( handy for non coders like me!). I also added Mollom to keep the spambots at bay, it works but a few users have complained it doesn't allways let them make posts, but if I loosen up the settings I get flooded with spambots. I've tried adding some entries to the htacess which has slowed it so I may try loosening it again. I still happen to think it's a very useful module
It also took me a while to find a nice layout, but I think "Acquia Slate" really does the job nicely, I've been through a few but this one really has a lot of space. My next major task is to make the site more user friendly and encourage more sign ups!