By j.mead on

So while it may be a little early, as I'm still getting the site ready for a few testers, I wanted to share my first forum site that I've created. http://lostpetsla.com - A site for posting lost, found, and even just seen pets for people in the greater L.A. area. I know there are many other sites already out there, but one more can't hurt, and many charge big fees or are so diverse in context/content they end being hard to use. I have the spare hosting resources, and this is just so much better than a sterile 'example' site to add to a web design profile. The power of Drupal and the numerous modules available allows me to offer a lot to people, and so far I can't see the cost adding up to much more than a few pennies a day so I can just pay it myself.

The idea came to me a week and half ago, and after registering the domain last weds, I've been slogging away at getting it up and started. While I've been using Drupal and Ubercart for over a year now quite successfully, how this new site is intended to work feels like I'm learning a whole new system, but in a good way.

The need to make people comfortable posting contact information has been the challenging part, and I want to make it as easy as possible for them to do so. I also know that an open site risks too much spam, so this was an early focus in terms of adding modules and protection. Hidden fields, mollom, and reCaptcha (w/mailhide) will hopefully reduce automated spam, and restricting anonymous users to lower access permissions should maybe keep the casual abuse low. At least I'm learning more about the available tools, and the benefits are already paying off for some of my other sites.

Getting new posts pushed to Twitter was fairly easy, and I'm just getting started on integrating Facebook as well. Having the ability to cross-post like this is just so amazingly easy, and makes the site a better value I feel. Of course getting people to use the site is the hardest part, but everyone I've talked to regarding the site see's the potential and it's a very easy thing to forward on to other people. Word of mouth advertising is always best, but the model of how the site should work helps advertising it fairly easy for me as well.

I actually tried starting this on D7 and I'm maintaining a cloned test site to prepare for an eventual upgrade, but I had to settle with D6 due to existing functionality and too many modules still in early D7 stages. Theme and graphical elements are a lower priority for now, but the modules that I'm currently using (a few may not stay or will be replaced)

addtoany (may become redundant if other modules work easily)
advanced_forum
cck (trying to learn to allow auto forum topic posting for ease of use)
ckeditor
colorbox (may have to switch to lightbox2 for compatibility to other modules)
fbconnect or drupal for facebook (i need to add posts to a fb stream, so whichever works better)
forward
galleryformatter
hiddencaptcha (i do hope this works as intended)
imce
mobile_codes
privatemessage
recaptcha
translate_this (might need to look into string related bits, but pretty quick & gets most things out of box)
twitter
usercomments
webform_validation

...and whatever modules that are needed to satisfy dependencies or are just very common.

Adding SSL is planned before launching to the public, I have to determine the consequences of a shared cert. as I this host requires a dedicated IP for a normal cert. and I haven't looked into the options yet for this particular account. Though I'd never use a shared cert for e-commerce sites, I think a shared cert is sufficient for the particular use here.

Is there something of importance that I'm missing, or are there suggestions that might help make it more user friendly? A good using cck for node creation tutorial would be awesome. Any advice people with more forum experience could offer would be much appreciated, as I am still just getting started it's easy to make deep changes before I have content that I value. Also I sometimes become blinded to the obvious by being so focused on one thing that the disaster lurking in the corner goes unnoticed.

Thanks for taking a look at this regardless.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

paolo12’s picture

paolo12 commented

Hi, your site looks professional except logo. I think you should change it. Next I would suggest to make dropdown menu items highlited on mouseover. And of course change a favicon.

j.mead’s picture

j.mead commented

Thanks for the suggestions, graphic design isn't my strong point and I haven't done much towards the theme at all, it's pretty much just a default use of 'Danland' - http://drupal.org/project/danland. It works amazingly out-of-box on D6 & 7, and I left the credit in the source though they do say you can completely remove it. I do have some people I can pester for graphic work, and just out of curiosity are you referring to the default text logo link above the images or the images themselves? as these were just a few layered bits i squashed together in an image program, and I'll probably just turn off the sitename link as it's provided by the theme as the default logo.

I do plan on addressing most of this shortly, but I have to focus on getting the functionality right first. A pretty looking site but with 100's of spam comments, or one that requires a highly technical user to be able to use it & post decent pictures is what I'm trying desperately to avoid. While forums are pretty common, I want to ensure that it's easy for most anyone to legitimately use it. I aim to push it out more towards the beginning of next year, but I'm very happy with how quickly its come together in just 9 days in my spare time and with the back and forth testing of modules and such.