By HeadHog on

Wanted to share my new site with everybody. KidJournalz - http://www.kidjournalz.com - is a Drupal-powered online baby/child journal allowing members to create public and private journals about their kids, track milestones and growth statistics, and form a network of friends on the site. It uses Facebook Connect to allow registration based on an existing Facebook account, and public journal entries can be posted to members' Facebook walls. Users can search for other parents near them, or search for kids based on geography and age. You can form a buddylist of members, which allows you to share your kids' journals with each other. Facebook members can also invite their friends from that site to join and view their kids. There's also an open forum and a section for exchanging parenting tips using a question and answer format.

It makes heavy use of Organic Groups, Views, Panels, Buddylist, Imagecache, the Invite API, and Workflow-NG. A lot of custom templating and CSS was used - tried to only customize code when absolutely necessary. Some custom jQuery was used to automate some parts of the site.

It's all brand new, so please take a look and try it out if you're interested - it's always completely free.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

jeremyd-1’s picture

jeremyd-1 commented

site looks great!

I'm just about to try building a site using the same features, for weight loss. could you give a short description on how the "track milestones and growth statistics" works?

thanks in advance.

HeadHog’s picture

HeadHog commented

Sure - short answer is its a custom CCK content type with fields for date, height, and weight.

For KidJournalz - kids are Organic Groups, and the other related content (journal entries, milestone, and stats) are content types that can be posted into groups. The stats content type allows group owners (parents) to enter a height and weight for their kid (add a post to the group) for a particular date. This is displayed on a tab in the group using Views and Panels. The graphical view uses Simile Timeplot (www.simile-widgets.org/timeplot/) to plot the data chronologically.

Not sure exactly what you're planning, but you may not need the overhead of Groups for a weight loss site - just a content type that lets users capture their weight for a particular date and some creative ways to display it.

Good luck - the weight loss niche seems to have lots of potential for eyeballs and engaged users...

jeremyd-1’s picture

jeremyd-1 commented

thanks for the info! thats a great help at pointing me in the right direction. now all i need to do is figure out cck!

i've got a lot of learning ahead of me. think i should've asked for the long version of the explanation! :)

thanks for your help, anyway.

HeadHog’s picture

HeadHog commented

Always glad to help out with questions...

In all honesty, reading through the docs and a little trial and error are the absolute best way to learn. Check out http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/cck and try out a few new content types to see how it works - its actually pretty intuitive. It might take a little digging sometimes, but there's some really good documentation on the Drupal site.

jeremyd-1’s picture

jeremyd-1 commented

hey man. thanks again for the info.

making my way through some cck tutorials and getting the hang of it now. :)

another question for you, if you don't mind.

is it possible for a "superuser" to be created that can receive emails from clients/view comments made by a client, and can easily access this particular clients account and quickly see their progress, with a view to adding comments to their account page, recommending they try certain exercises, etc. would this be feasible over a large amount of members?

thanks again, really appreciate your help!

HeadHog’s picture

HeadHog commented

Hmmm...you're getting into a different kind of site than I've been working with, but I'll share what comes to mind.

First, get familiar with the basic Access Control (under Admin->User Management). That's where you can assign different permissions to different types of users, so its where you'd start defining your 'superuser'. You could pretty easily create a class of user that could view others' content & comments. As far as these superusers communicating back to others, you could very easily allow them to use the standard contact form to send email messages to users. I'm not sure offhand how you'd make it more interactive - ie adding comments to their account page. You'd probably need some sort of module that would place a block on account pages which could be populated with posts made by your superusers. I'd obviously search for something already contributed before you launch into writing your own, but don't know of one off the top of my head. Maybe also look into Privatemsg and Notifications to see some of the standard ways communication within a site is handled.

How feasible this is really depends on how many users you get, how many superusers you have performing that function, and how much content is involved. And you could always get really fancy and look into ways to have your site automatically make recommendations to users based on what else they've done on the site.

Probably worth it to post some focused questions to the much larger and very helpful community here and see what other ideas folks have...