Pre-configuration of a website for a social network on Drupal

In this lesson, I will preconfigure Drupal for a social network. I will install the following modules:

• Logintoboggan
• Captcha
• Pathauto, Token, Transliteration
• Tagadelic
• Backup and Migrate

Captcha

We’re all familiar with the minor annoyances that come with account creation. The Captcha module allows you to use image CAPTCHAs, numeric challenges, and more. Additional options are provided by the Captcha module. You can choose the types of forms on which to apply CAPTCHA (registration, login, contact form, etc.), as well as a range of other settings.

Pathauto

The Pathauto module significantly improves the appearance of your URLs. Instead of something like node/46532, it will generate URLs like content/about-drupal. You can use additional tokens to generate URLs based on title, username, user ID, and more.

Tagadelic

With all the talk of the semantic web, tags are an important part of your site. You likely have some "free tags", and the Tagadelic module gives you a proper way to display these free-form tags. We'll need some meaningful tags to fully showcase the power of this module. Since this is a community site where users play a central role, we will assign tags to users. This gives us a way to view users via a tag cloud.

Backup and Migrate

This module allows you to easily and quickly transfer a site from one server to another. I will cover how it works in another lesson.