Drupal demo: Social network with blogs, buddylists, geocoding

Goal: Create a Web 2.0 social network with multi-user blogs, buddylists and bookmarks for each member, geocoding the locations of users, and a members' discussion forum.

Design:

• multi-user blogs: enabling Drupal's core Blog module allows each member to create their own blog
• buddylists: enabling the contributed BuddyList module allows members to add each other to their buddy networks
• bookmarks: enabling the contributed Userlink module allows members to add their own bookmarks
• geocoding: enabling the contributed Location module allows members to specify their location at registration
• member profiles:
  • avatars: enabling Drupal's core User settings and contributed Imagecache module allows members to upload their avatar image, which is resized and cropped, and displayed with their comments
  • additional information at registration e.g. first name, last name, interests: enabling the contributed CCK module allows additional fields to be associated with content types. The contributed Location module is also used.
  • member listing: enabling the contributed Views module allows the administrator to create criteria dependent lists of specific node types and their fields
• forums: enabling Drupal's core Forum module allows for multiple discussion forums
• contact: enabling Drupal's core Contact module allows members to email each other via forms submitted on the site

Printable notes: If you are looking for printouts to accompany this downloadable demonstration, here are some external resources:

• User registration - After I had started building this demonstration, I realized Michelle at Shell Multimedia had performed a very similar excercise with detailed, step by step, instructions: http://shellmultimedia.com/node/5
• Avatars - Also, team Lullabot's writeup for autoresizing uploaded user avatar pictures: http://www.lullabot.com/articles/imagecache_example_user_profile_picture...

Outcome:

Download and install:

• if you don't have already have a web+database server to run Drupal, try XAMPP
• Extract dru52.socnet.zip to your htdocs folder
• create a database named dru52_socnet_db, ensure your db user has access priveleges to this database, and import/populate tables from htdocs/dru52.socnet/database.sql
• update htdocs/dru52.socnet/sites/default/settings.php to point to your database
  
  

  $db_url = 'mysql://username:password@localhost/dru52_socnet_db';
  $db_prefix = 'dru52_';
  

• login to the Drupal install use 'admin' and 'password'
• n.b. module updates: If modules are updated after this blog entry is posted, you can still use the download, get the latest modules from http://drupal.org/project/modules, and run http://localhost/dru52.socnet/update.php

Known issues: The integration of the extended user profile has to be cleaned up, at the moment, editing it requires clumsy navigation (edit content vs edit user profile). Also, when editing the extended user profile, probably due to a auto_nodetitle configuration, the node titles (== usernames) are not preserved.