social | Learn By The Drop

Adding Community Features To Your Site

Submitted by learnbythedrop on Mon, 05/18/2009 - 19:36

Lesson Fifteen of my special Getting Started With Drupal series of instructional videos.

This lesson provides guidance on how to get a community started by configuring the core forum module , the core tracker module and allowing users to be able to set up their own account. Includes a look at the changes required to the Mollom (spam prevention) and Comment Notify (subscribe to comments) modules that were initially added in Lesson Eleven.

The premium version of this lesson is encoded at the full 1024x768 resolution as originally recorded.

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Twitter And Your Drupal Site

Submitted by learnbythedrop on Fri, 04/10/2009 - 08:45

Twitter is the hottest social network on the web right now so it's reasonable to think that Drupal site builders would be seeking different ways to integrate their sites with Twitter.Thankfully, there are a number of ways that Drupallers can leverage the power of Twitter on their sites.

Twitter Module

The Twitter module allows you to post to or grab user data from Twitter. The module allows you to add the user and password for a site wide twitter account that will post items to Twitter when they are published to the Drupal site. You can choose which node types will send a notification to Twitter and add some additional default text to the post as well. There is also an option to let users input their personal Twitter account information so that their tweets can be imported to their profiles on your site.

Twitter Node Settings

Twitter Post Example

Imported Twitter Statuses

Tweet Module

The Tweet module adds a link that makes it very easy for site visitors to share your nodes on Twitter. The link to share with Twitter is displayed in the "links section" on nodes and teasers. The tweet link can be presented as an icon and the module project page points to some free "tweet this" buttons that you can use.

Tweet Link Example

Feed API

Twitter offers a wide variety of feeds that you can then import to your Drupal site using the Feed API module. Once imported via the Feed API module you can customize the presentaton of the tweets using the views module. Each user has their own RSS feed (here's mine) that is linked in the right sidebar of their profile page. Twitter searches via http://search.twitter.com also generate RSS feeds as well. Here's a feed link generated by a search for "drupal" on Twitter. You can get even more granular feeds from Twitter if you use their advanced search feature. For example, here's a feed generated from a search for "drupal" and my username on Twitter. The feed only displays the tweets from me that mention Drupal.

Tweets Imported With FeedAPI

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Socializing Content With Ratings And Sharing Links

Submitted by learnbythedrop on Sat, 03/14/2009 - 23:18

Lesson Twelve of my special Getting Started With Drupal series of instructional videos.

This lesson focuses on socializing your content by allowing your site visitors to easily share and rate site content. Automatic sharing links for sites like Facebook, Delicious, Digg and others are generated by the Service Links module. A star based rating system for nodes is powered by the Fivestar module which also requires the Voting API module.

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Connecting With Facebook

Submitted by learnbythedrop on Sun, 03/08/2009 - 11:14

I spent quite a bit of time yesterday updating my I Heart Mets site to Drupal 6. One thing that I added that wasn't included in the Drupal 5 version of the site was support for Facebook Connect. I made the connection using the Facebook Connect module for Drupal.

Adding Facebook Connect to the site was pretty simple thanks to the module. I followed the directions in the Read Me file for the module and things seem to work fine. This is one of those modules where you need to download files from another site (in this case Facebook) and perform some configuration on Facebook as well. That's why it's very important that you consult the Read Me file for the module.

The Facebook Connect module adds a number of features that can help you to grow a community site.

New users can sign up using their Facebook account information.
Users can use their Facebook picture as their picture on your site.
Users can import their Facebook profile information into their profile on your site.
Users can invite their Facebook friends to join your site.
When connected users comment on your site they can have a message published back into their feeds on Facebook.
If a user is logged in to Facebook they can login to your site simply by clicking the "connect with Facebook" link.

I think that adding this feature to a Drupal powered community site makes a lot of sense because it seems like everyone is on Facebook right now. These features make it easier for users to interact with your site and also eases the process of having them introduce the site to their friends.

I have included some screenshots below that show some of the features added when you use the Facebook Connect module.

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Sharing Posted Content

Submitted by learnbythedrop on Sat, 06/21/2008 - 20:44

Once you've begun to post content on your Drupal site it is likely that you will want to provide visitors a method for sharing that content with other people. Thankfully there is no shortage of services that allow you to facilitate the process of sharing content you've posted to your site. Each node can have one or more links that make it simple for visitors to bookmark or forward content to others. Allow me to present you with a few options for sharing that I frequently implement on my Drupal sites.

Service Links

The images at left show examples of the settings and implementation for the service links module.

Forward

[img_assist|nid=63|title=|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=150|height=99] The Forward module allows site vistors to email posts to other people. The module adds an email this link to each node that allows the user to send a link to the post, plus a personal message to one or more email addresses. The module includes a variety of settings that allow site builders to customize the experience, including html email templates. Forward tracking allows administrators to know which posts were shared. A most emailed block lets you share popular content with your site visitors.

The image to the left shows an example of the form presented to the user when they choose to email the post.

Custom Javascript

Every social bookmarking site that's worth a damn will provide a bit of javascript that you can insert into your templates. Digg is by far the most popular content sharing site on the internet today. You can use Digg tools for webmasters to add code to your Drupal site that allows for submission and display of the number of Diggs for the post. I've implemented this within a block on the right side of this page. Del.icio.us is another very popular content sharing site. They offer a couple of very basic save page buttons that you can add to your site as well.

Some services exist simply to provide a wide variety of sharing options for your content. Add This and Share This offer very similar services to site builders. They provide a bit of javascript that presents the user with a variety of options for sharing or bookmarking website content. I've taken advantage of the Add This service by adding the code to my node templates that presents the Bookmark Post link at the bottom right corner of each post.

Administrators that are not comfortable editing templates should also consider adding these codes to blocks in the sidebar of pages they want to share. Follow this link to see an example of a page that utilizes the Share This service code in the right sidebar to simplifying the sharing of a blog on a Drupal powered website.

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