Modules for Social Networks

Posted by jck.kln on April 7, 2008 at 1:57pm

Hi!
I'm going to create a Social Network based on Drupal. It's my first time that I use Drupal and I'm impressed with the high quantity of modules. There are a lot of modules for each subject (i.e. image gallery, blog, etc). Now I've got a problem because I don't know which are the most useful modules to build a Social Network.

Could you tell me which are the indispensable modules to create a Social Network with Drupal? or which is the best module in a concrete subject?

Thanks in advance.

Comments

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Posted by michelle on April 7, 2008 at 2:28pm

I've got a list started here: [dead link removed]

Michelle

See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region

I made some test before

Posted by jck.kln on April 7, 2008 at 3:24pm

I made some test before those posts and I think that I can add only forums in the groups (like in your demo). Can I add more elements (wiki, image gallery) in a page? My intention is to create a group for each community (community samples: photo community or sports community) and this group could have a wiki, a blog, etc. and also subgroups (sports community's subgroups samples: tennis subgroup, football subgroup, etc).

Can I develop this kind of social network with drupal? With which modules?

Thanks for pointing out your

Posted by ebrittwebb on April 8, 2008 at 1:19pm

Thanks for pointing out your social networking playground. Very cool.

Erik Britt-Webb
drupal@ebrittwebb.com

Yes. essential Organic

Posted by icecreamyou on April 7, 2008 at 8:25pm

Yes.

essential
Organic Groups, User Relationships, OG_Subgroups, Userpoints, PrivateMsg, Subscriptions, Views, Update Status, Forum Access with ACL, Abuse, CAPTCHA, CCK, Invite with DCL Importer, PathAuto, Token, Tagadelic, Fivestar, XML Sitemap

recommended
Usernode, MySite, User Titles, User Stats, Kudos, TinyMCE, Quote, Signature for Forums, Smileys, some kind of image module, CRE (content recommendation engine), 'me' aliases, Advanced User Management, Service Links, Comment Subject, Comment Upload, Guestbook, Word Filter, Community Tags

acceptable
Avatar Selection, Activity, Views Bookmarks, Panels, LoginToboggan, Birthdays, Bookmark Us, Recent Changes and Diff, Forward, Email Verify, Google Analytics, Meta Tags, Search404, Search Type with Search Config, Taxonomy Browser, User Interests, Username AJAX Check, Message Effects, Chatroom (powerful) or Chatblock (weak), Event, Nice Menus, Printer-Friendly Pages, Signup, Spoiler

For wikis you can use either the core Books module or a contributed module. There are several contributed ones, including Liquid Wiki Engine Project, this installation profile, and/or PearWiki Filter and/or some of the other modules that show up on the PearWiki project page.

I wish someone had given me this list when I was starting. :D

Thanks!

Posted by jck.kln on April 8, 2008 at 9:53am

I am installing the modules you have proposed and I think they will be very very useful.

Thanks a lot!

No Problem

Posted by icecreamyou on April 8, 2008 at 9:53pm

I started with Drupal last September. My only previous web experience was the relatively simple HTML and CSS it took to create http://www.icecreamyou.com.

I spent six months with Drupal building http://www.babelup.com. I built it alone, but it mostly took six months because I had no idea what I was doing. So I can appreciate what it means to get huge pointers rather than having to spend days searching through all the modules. It was a gigantic project, a very feature-rich "social network for social activism."

This past weekend I built my third Drupal site (the second, though the highest-traffic one, was a relatively inconsequential task that I did for a group of people I work with). I built it alone from scratch in about 36 hours of work (which was possible because I used no custom modules and no custom theming apart from CSS tweaks). It's not quite complete because I discovered after I took it live Sunday night that using certain parts of the site was tedious, but it gives you an idea of how powerful a tool Drupal can be once you learn enough to use it effectively. :) The new site, in case you're interested, is BMusic: http://music.babelup.com. It lets you share playlists with people (not the music itself - that would be illegal - but I'm going to add links to Amazon Music).

I'm working on a write-up of how I went from BabelUp to BMusic. The main lessons learned are from a technical perspective: knowing what modules you're going to install ahead of time, configuring everything at once in a sensible order, not overcrowding the page with blocks. But don't ignore marketing - otherwise the site just sits there, as BabelUp is doing largely because I don't have the time to fully maintain it.

Thanks for the very useful

Posted by aaron_baugher on May 25, 2008 at 11:27pm

Thanks for the very useful list! I notice many of these modules don't seem to be available for 6.x yet. Are people doing social networking sites typically sticking with 5.x for now?

The general trend is that

Posted by icecreamyou on May 27, 2008 at 5:33pm

The general trend is that people who run production sites without doing a lot of development first use last-gen systems because they're stable and well-tested. People who don't need a lot of complex functionality immediately (like with personal blogs) or people who want to test and develop on the new "toys" use the newest versions of everything. So social networking sites running on Drupal are mostly still on 5.x.

What do these do?

Posted by ikarugajones on November 8, 2009 at 12:57am

Thanks for the links ... but what do these do? There's too many to try out...

Thank You.

Posted by drtrueblue on October 5, 2010 at 4:39am

Fantastic listing. Much obliged. Anything new to add?

There's a pretty extensive

Posted by allella on April 10, 2008 at 10:37pm

There's a pretty extensive list and discussion about Drupal social network type modules here.
http://groups.drupal.org/node/7968

Find people you know functionality

Posted by aliyayasir on July 2, 2008 at 4:09am

Hi guys,
I wana add "Find people you know" functionality same as facebook have in my social networking site
is there any drupal module for this.Need your help/comments/algos to develop this functionality.
Best,
Aly

Algo of People you know.

Posted by blue.moon on August 26, 2008 at 5:26am

You should install a module DCL importer, which imports contacts from your email account i.e. gmail's Yahoo's and MSN. I don't know if it provides functionality to alter this module in best way but if it do than I can write some simple steps.

1) Make This Drupal form a Multistep Form and Disable its redirection, you can do this simply put

$form['#redirect'] = FALSE;
$form['#multistep'] = TRUE;

2) In first Step you will Find People in your contact list and it stores complete list in $SESSION, and in 2nd step you can find these contact list in drupal's user list.

Note : Actually this module is contributed module which ties with Invite module to invite people....
But I think it will be worthy if you use this as just store the list people you know.

3) if you want to add them directly you can just hack code form buddylist to add them directly and for remaining contacts you can either skip them or invite them.

Thanks
Blue Moon

I wrote a script for User

Posted by icecreamyou on July 2, 2008 at 6:06pm

I wrote a script for User Relationships that does this, and Buddylist2 has it built in.

You can find the UR script here: http://drupal.org/node/239162
If you're really adventurous, you can customize it by including matching profile fields. I don't recommend it unless you know what you're doing though.