How to create "Community"

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alexmc's picture

This isn't really a technical question... I'm mostly kicking off a conversation....

How do you build a community with Drupal? Here are some of the ideas I am coming up with.

1) Have it easy for people to log in with their existing accounts (Facebook/Twitter etc)
1a) Fetch their icon photos from Facebook
2) Have people "follow" others with the same interests
3) Have an extensive User Profile system
4) Have a private messaging system
5) Also post to Facebook and Twitter to help piggy back off users' communities on those systems....
6) use people's avatar icons whenever possible - not just their names.
7) Try to get things live (like Facebook or Twitter page updating every few seconds - not just on refresh)

What do you feel is needed for an online community? What have I missed?

Comments

People, not features

Michelle's picture

I've been researching and trying (and mostly failing) to build a local community site for many years and the biggest thing I've found is that technology doesn't matter. As long as you have something that works reasonably well, bells and whistles don't bring people in; people do. People hang out where their friends are hanging out. If you have a specific niche, you can draw people in by the subject if you have good content but anything general is going to struggle to get any traction these days when peoples' friends are all on Facebook.

Michelle

Tools

MarketStone's picture

Make sure to provide tools. For nnepdx we are providing a mobile site for are users like taxnbooks_mobi using jquery mobile, One of the VOIP guys set up a free answering system for a low income community. This is a great tool for people on fixed income. Our business directory of N and NE Portland will be exclusive making us the one to compete with in this area. For the directory i just made anode for each letter and made a quick tab then made a content type for each record for the directory a user has permissions to fill in the directory cck. In the directory cck i put a term reference for my epages (white pages) and the gold epages (yellow pages) then made a view for each letter in the tabs that shows the directory cck.

i will have the data base and sites file available at marketstone_com if You can find it my site is only 1 page, a large px site 9000px x 9000px it is some where in the middle around 2000px down and 3000px over from the left in the forum. This will be a clean copy of the site with just the first user that i plan to use for zeda_org. You just change the database and username in the settings.php file and change the default first user username and password. You can follow our progress at http://www.marketstone.com/clients/zeda/

It's time to put the Net to work, Ran

Check this tool out

MarketStone's picture

We are working on a "Net Map" with http://arborjs.org/ , RFDa and XML we can create a "Net Map" for our users. They will plugin the sites they want mapped, facebook, tweeter, flicker, nnepdx, google, linkedin and arbor will map all Your connections and friends and how they circle back to You. This will take Parallel computing Your next desk top will have a 100 quad core chips we need this power to make this work. We need to get this up and running so some one does not patent it. Pretty cool stuff!

i made a netmap w/ arbor

MarketStone's picture

for MarketStone at http://www.marketstone.com/#netmap or the lower right hand corner. Does not work in ie. Would be great to here if You think just another JS gimmick or useful graphical presentation. (love the physics!)

How made the yellow pages

MarketStone's picture

in Administration » Configuration » People » Account settings in manage fields i added my business fields with 2 being a "term reference" one for ep (epages or white pages) and one for gep (gold epages or yellow pages) made the taxonomy's ep (A,B,C) gep (Accountants, Acoustical, Advertising) then made a view for each taxonomy and used quicktabs for the display. The user just adds the term they want to be displayed in, at sign up or user edit. This site will need a dedicated server because it is going to get heavy. Next i have to repeat this process for my mobile site using jquery mobile. Because the epages will link to the users mobile site. (i just thought about i could put the mobile link with in the desk top epages then i would not have to repeat the process.) Do not get behind the curve on this mobile stuff it will be required soon for a successful site. As all phones are moving to HTML5 making a mobile site wins over phone apps because there are just to many products and an App is just for that one product and a mobile site is for all products.

We will have this sites .sql file and sites folder available at our web site soon, for anyone to use or look at how we did stuff.

site: http://www.marketstone.com/clients/zeda/

None of this could be done without drupal 7 i wonder if Dries realizes the world is a better place because All of You and him are in it! Thanks Drupaler's!

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