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

[img_assist|nid=61|title=|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=150|height=124] [img_assist|nid=62|title=|desc=|link=node|align=center|width=150|height=62] The Service Links module is very simple to implement. The module provides a variety of settings that allow you to choose the appropriate services, while controlling how or when the links to those services display. You can choose from a wide variety of content sharing sites. On this site I've chosen to offer Del.icio.us, Digg and StumbleUpon as options for sharing each node.

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.