Crowd Sourcing Project (With Social Media Features Needed)
We have a bare-bones volunteer development team at a non-profit based in Brighton, UK. Out of our group, one is excellent with PHP and the other is a database specialist. Both are very good with social media and integrating the concepts into site design.
We need a solution for a crowdsourcing project. I am new(er) to the organisation and the tendency has been to hand-code projects. I don't like to reinvent the wheel each time since there are so many plug-ins available for systems like Drupal. The heart of our application is the collection of neighbourhood records in order to create a content rich website to connect the history of streets and neighbourhoods together. In order to do this and facilitate a sense of community, we have decided to take best practices from Wikipedia, Facebook, flickr, blogs, and standard web practice.
Some of the must-have social media constructs include: ability to have user profiles that show all activity on the system, geared towards a "reward" mechanism for contributing; user ratings (a la eBay or Digg), a home page for each entity in the system (user, neighbourhood), a news/activity stream showing actions for each entity on the system, and the ability to add anecdotal "comments", pictures, and other multimedia to each entity home page. Some threaded discussions may also be nice, as would some sort of central repository of historical information.
I know there are modules available that will connect to sites like Facebook but are there modules or built-in features that will allow you to create the constructs of such sites (i.e. the newstream) within the context of your own community base?
Also- can anyone comment how steep the learning curve would be for implementing a complex solution in Drupal (as compared to hand-coding all of these features).
Look forward to any responses. Cheers, dave.
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From what you describe, imo drupal can handle your requirements without the need for 3rd party site or app integration.
As for the learning curve-- it's just about impossible to comment on intelligently. it's definitely there-- but how steep it is will be relative to the site, customizations required, and the skills of those building it. I would think it has to be better than rolling your own from scratch no matter what though.
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Thank you. I actually found a
Thank you. I actually found a report on idealware (http://www.idealware.org/comparing_os_cms/index.php, requires registration for pdf download) that highlights the different Web2.0 functionality between the systems beautifully. It reports that Drupal comes out on top in this area.
The only questions I have beyond what is highlighted in that document are this:
1) How easy is it to create integrated pages for functions such as data entry that are bound to a custom database schema?
2) Is there support for an activity stream (much like the news feed in facebook)? I supposed that this could be handled to an extent by hacking/tailoring the RSS feeds that are built in to the system.
I am going to install Drupal this weekend for fun and see what I can learn. Thanks again.
dave // DAVE/AVENUE
Currently looking for Drupal solutions for crowdsourcing and open source writing projects.
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1) for an existing data store? Or do you mean to develop one for use with drupal? If the latter, you don't need to get into the db for that-- you would create custom content types with whatever cck fields (ie text, integer, file, image, email, etc) you need to capture your data. Drupal handles the creation of the appropriate db schema-- that's the whole point of using a cms. ;-). If you have existing data you want to manipulate/display from drupal you'd have to custom code that, but you might be able to use the views module to do it.
2) see http://drupal.org/project/activitystream and http://drupal.org/project/activity
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Don't be a Help Vampire - read and abide the forum guidelines.
If you find my assistance useful, please pay it forward to your fellow drupalers.