Drupal and Social Networking Sites functions capability SURVEY
I am a master student from London South Bank University in the United Kingdom. I am doing a research on one specific aspect of Drupal.
In essence my study is about assessing ways in which Drupal can be used to provide various kind of social networking functions since it wasn't primarily designed for that purpose.
Please tell us how you think this great content managemnt system ( CMS) can also provide social networking capabilities (features).
In order to help us answer the above question it would be extremely helpful to have the views of Drupal users like yourself.
With this in mind we will be grateful if you would take time to complete this short online survey ( Click on link below) by the 8th October?
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=2myO13PYkJfRNJee9buxsw_3d_3d
Many thanks
By yesterday?
Unless someone has a time machine, that's impossible since you posted this link on the 25 the of September.
You can find some articles related to social networking in Drupal on my site: http://shellmultimedia.com and my SN demo site is at http://shellsn.com . There's also a social networking install profile in the works here: http://drupal.org/project/dsnf_install
In general, Drupal can do social networking but it takes a lot of work. We aren't to the point where someone can just grab a package and have an instant social network. It takes a lot of time selecting the modules, making them all work together, and customizing the site to get exactly what you want.
Michelle
-- Sig --
I'm looking for folks to help me out by posting in my Coulee Region forums. You don't need to live in the area; there's plenty of general forums. But please, no Drupal support questions. :)
The survey itself says it
The survey itself says it needs to be completed by October 8th.
You can read my opinions about Social Networking with Drupal here and here.
Essentially, the main problem with SN in Drupal is that there are a lot of modules that do a lot of things relevant to social networks, but they often don't work together as well as would be nice. For example, if you want to build a blog, you basically just need to enable the core blog module or maybe one of the multiblog modules and you're set to go -- maybe you add pathauto and globalredirect and addthis and some taxonomy module, but that's basically the core functionality of your site. If you want an ecommerce site, there are two entire, complete suites of modules (ECommerce and Ubercart) that make your site run smoothly. If you want a news site, you install CCK, Views, WYSIWYG, flag or nodequeue, and you've got the basic flow. But if you want a social networking site, there's a whole host of modules out there to choose from that all do different things and rarely work together to do them. That's partially because the definition of SN is so wide. You could base a site on the Organic Groups suite, or you could base it on Facebook-style Statuses, or you could base it on Forums, or you could base it on image galleries. But what if you want all of that? And what if you want private messages too? What if you want both sitewide and user galleries? What if you want each Organic Group to have their own forum, image gallery, and status stream? And which friend module do you use? How do you keep profile information private except to friends? What about chatting?
Then, unless you know how to write modules, you're a little stuck. To build the perfect SN site, you need a lot of elements to work together, and right now they're not all synched. At the moment it requires a significant amount of knowledge to tweak everything to where it all comes together nicely. It can be done -- and it can be done more easily than on most other CMS's -- but it is by no means a pick-up-and-go solution.
Complete the Survey
Thank you Michelle, the deadline has been extended to the 08th October. Given your level of expertise, I'll appreciate if you would fill in the Survey.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=2myO13PYkJfRNJee9buxsw_3d_3d
Many thanks to IcecreamYou for taking the time to complete the Survey.
Done
I pretty much said the same thing as I said here but there you have it in survey form. :)
Michelle
-- Sig --
I'm looking for folks to help me out by posting in my Coulee Region forums. You don't need to live in the area; there's plenty of general forums. But please, no Drupal support questions. :)
Thanks!
Thank you Michelle. I appreciate your contribution.Cheers!