Posted by jyhliu on February 10, 2009 at 2:43am
Hi guys,
I was hoping that someone could give me some advice about my Web 2.0 website i am trying to build.
After looking at the options I thought Drupal would be the best thing to use, but the website i'm trying to build is pretty difficult, so I'd like some guidance on whether I should get outsider help or continue trying to build it using Drupal myself.
I'm guessing that I need some help but if someone (who knows Drupal) could help confirm this that would be fantastic, and get me going in the right direction again.
Thanks,
Jay Liu
Comments
If you're new to Drupal and
If you're new to Drupal and you think the idea you have is difficult to build, chances are you'll need outside help in order to create it in Drupal.
If you don't mind sharing some info on here, we can probably tell you what to do to get your hands dirty in Drupal! ;-)
This website is going..
...to be a social website focusing on the story's of people's lives.
The basic concept is that an individual is trying to build the story of their lives through the culmination of various parts of other stories.
They can either find the various story parts themselves or the website would suggest some story parts based on people who have similar lives.
The difficulty comes in how accurate the algorithms are that make the recommendations, and how easy is it to find story parts and display them in an intuitive and integrated way. Story parts can be text or multi-media (Youtube video, a link to another site).
To add to the difficulty I was hoping to incorporate an AJAX drag and drop interface for users to choose the story parts they think are relevant.
I hope that's enough for you to get an idea of what I'm trying to do.
Thanks for your response(s).
Jay
Hmm... I don't know exactly
Hmm... I don't know exactly how you can achieve the "finding story parts and build them into one's own life story" thing, but let me take a crack it anyway...
In Drupal, a piece of content is called a "node". So, a blog post is a node, a mission statement page is another node... etc. I would imagine that when your users write a story, the whole story will be a "Story" node. Each person will have many stories.
It's probably not hard to accumulate multiple "Story" nodes to build a story or your own... problem is, how does the system know what to suggest from other people's life stories?
People can tag their stories or file them into categories and stuff... but sounds like you're asking for some sort of crawler to basically "read" through all the stories and automatically index the important terms... you want a semantic search bot to automatically give you suggestions of other people's stories based on your own stories! Am I right?
I can tell u that Drupal can only bring you to the point of "tagging and categorizing of stories", but that algorithmic search stuff? That's gonna be hard! But before you spend a million dollars buying that search technology, you know what's gonna be even harder? Getting people to write their stories on a Drupal platform! :P (Seriously, I've tried to get school children from my mother school to write stories / blogs on wordpress - which is soooo much more intuitive for non-tech users... but no one wrote anything!) But don't give up, I still haven't.
Thoughts, guys?
Well..
..in my case i was thinking that a node would be categorised by the user's tags but also, who the user was (eg. if the node was written by a type A* user, the node would also be internally categorised as a type A node).
So there would be no need to read what it actually said, with a crawler like you suggested, jut accurately categorise it. Recommendations would then be based on a scoring system, where a node would be matched to a user based on how many common terms they share.
Thanks for your reply, and I hope this clarifies things a bit.
*type A could mean male or female, an age segmentation/ user beahaviour generated profile etc...
You might take a look at the
You might take a look at the content recommendation engine:
http://drupal.org/project/cre
--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Web Developer
Advomatic LLC
East Asia Office
Hong Kong
--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
Cheers, I'll take a peep...
..at this. Seems like it's not exactly want i would like but hopefully it can be adapted easily.
I'll let you know my progress!
Jay
After hearing more about
After hearing more about what you are trying to do last night I had some ideas.
I think most of what you need can be handled with CCK (and the related field modules), Views, and Solr; perhaps with some Panels and Nodequeue to manage content presentation; and some usability enhancements with things like Pathauto, LoginToboggan, and Advanced help. Be careful to avoid modulitis. See if you can do almost all of what you need with those before looking at other modules. Fewer modules (be they core, contrib, or custom) is usually better for reasons of usability, maintainability and performance.
A story could use one or more vocabularies (perhaps one of them could be tags that might be populated by the OpenCalais module), and maybe a few fields to store additional metadata.
You should take a look at Solr search ( listen to this podcast to get an introduction http://www.lullabot.com/audiocast/podcast-69-solr-robert-douglass-jacob-... ). This might be both a great way for your users to find stories, and to do the recommendation of new content (so you don't have to write your own algorithms).
--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Web Developer
Advomatic LLC
East Asia Office
Hong Kong
--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
Thanks...
...for this Dave. We'll start Drupaling and let you know it goes.
Good meeting you guys last night.
Jay