Creating a social network on Drupal

Drupal: Pushing the Limits

Drupal is one of the best content management systems (CMS). In fact, it won the 2008 Best Open Source CMS and Best PHP Open Source CMS awards—twice! After about 8 years of development, Drupal has become one of the most powerful and versatile frameworks available. Its incredible flexibility is both its greatest strength... and its greatest weakness. Any functionality is possible—but where do you start? I’ve spent long days exploring various modules, their use cases, compatibility, bugs, and quirks, to confidently recommend what works. More and more people started asking me how I implemented certain community features, so I decided to bring everything together into a series of articles. Readers will explore a variety of modules and configuration options necessary for building a community-driven website. This will be a journey into module discovery and customization within a CMS ecosystem.

Building a Social Network

Community sites are popping up all over the web like virtual mushrooms. Each one has its unique features—so let’s make sure our site is a true social network. I suggest the following criteria define a social network:

• A shared purpose among visitors for coming to the site.
• Visitors with common interests or from a particular area.
• Interaction between users in a public space.
• A group of people with shared characteristics or social backgrounds.
• Groups united by a common policy.
• Coalitions of people or countries with shared historical, social, economic, or political interests (e.g., international communities).
• Associations based on shared professional or academic interests (e.g., scholarly societies).

We can summarize this definition into a few key ideas: common interests, groups of people, shared location, and mutual policies. For virtual communities, this translates to:

1. Common interests: Visitors to your site share something. Whether it’s about Drupal, health, or bowling—make the “theme” of your site clear, because that’s what users care about.

2. Group of people: Every registered user becomes part of the community. So, the goal is to attract as many users as possible.

3. Public space: The internet—your website—is that space.

4. Mutual policy: Your site should have some basic ground rules. What are users allowed to do? What behavior is acceptable? One of the primary goals of building a community site is to foster user interaction. Your users need to feel like they’re in a public space, sharing with others, to truly develop a sense of community.

Drupal is powerful, but its potential isn’t always obvious in the default installation. That’s okay, because Drupal is designed to be extensible. It gives us the tools to build amazing sites using contributed modules.

Creating a Social Network with Drupal is Easy!

But what if you don’t know PHP? Isn’t that necessary to build a great site? Not really. I recommend using modules that provide functionality right out of the box. That’s the beauty of Drupal—it gives us this opportunity, and we should embrace it. That’s the guiding philosophy of this article series. I will only use contributed modules and will not write any custom modules. Occasionally, we’ll use small code snippets inserted through the UI and stored in the database. These will be explained in a user-friendly way. That way, anyone can build a fantastic site.

This well-thought-out strategy offers the following advantages:

1. Anyone can do it—we only use existing modules.

2. Scalability—you can always install new modules later to add features safely.

3. Small code snippets to fine-tune specific details.