The Cloning 16 social media sites in Drupal made it's way back to me again. While it doesn't provide step-by-step instructions, it does illustrate what a modular CMS like Drupal is capable of. High level functionality for sites like Facebook, Digg, Tumblr, Twitter, Amazon, Blogger and Youtube can be architected an hour or so. A proof-of-concept prototype could be done in a Webcast*.
This shows that Drupal can be seen as a web application framework.
Activity Stream is a Drupal module that allows you and your users to aggregate social media feeds into one place. The default modules supports feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, and Last.fm, as well as allowing users to enter a Feed URL for import.
Currently I am developing out the user interface for an online community. Before getting started, I a lot of time on some of the most popular (and some not so popular) social community website, and created a list of basic elements to include when developing out user profiles in a social community.
Drupal 7 will bring about a new way of implementing user profiles with the integration of CCK in core & support for CCK fields for users. In Drupal 6, site builders rely on a core module called "Profile" or contributed module called "Content Profile" to create user profiles.
Building a large following on Twitter can be akin to acting as a club promoter trying get as many people to the party as possible. You have to build up your street cred, know the right people (or at least seem like you do), and make people feel cool just being in your presence. You also want other people to want to get to know you because they feel it will increase his/her social or professional value.
Hopefully, if you’re making a decision on re-designing or building a new website for your company at least one of the criteria for selecting an agency is; 1. “Doe's the agency’s own web site reflect the same kind of results that are being proposed for your new website?" In other words, doe's the website design company or agency practice what they preach?
By default, views of type Term link to category pages (taxonomy/term/[tid]). I find that category pages are more useful as custom views where you can control fields. You can effectively replace the default category pages with a customized view by following this views recipe. And no programming is needed.
I am currently on a project that requires a 2-level drop down navigation and a sidebar block that displays the pages in the current section. This is not the first or second time I have used this recipe so it's time to share. This block can be used to display other pages in a section.
As Drupal becomes more popular and grows its open-source development community, more websites are turning to it as a solution for creating extremely powerful online communities, allowing users to submit their own content to a community hub. The power of these hubs is obviously their users and creating an organized, easy to use interface can be the difference between failure and success.
Mike Walsh, CEO of Leverage Software gives a great presentation on Ambient Discovery and Awareness at the Inbound Marketing Summit 2009 in Dallas. Out of all the presenters, I'd say Mike had the coolest looking slide deck, which consisted of a bunch of handwritten slides. Unfortunately, I could only get the first 20 minutes of the presentation, as the battery on my Flip Mino HD died part way though. This is a great listen/view, if and when you get the chance!
