Building Social Networks
This session will address how complex social networks of various types can be built with Drupal. The nuances of Feeds, Walls, Sharing (both private and public), Friends, Following, and (most importantly) Privacy will be explored, and options for building these features with Drupal will be discussed, with examples from the real world.
How do you make a network "Social"?
A Drupal site is a network of users and content, but it is not inherently social. It's greatest original feature was the ability for multiple users to collaborate in managing the system. We'll talk about what makes networks social and what makes them fun: Feeds, Activity, & Sharing.
"News Feeds" can show not only your friend's content, but your friends-of-your-friends content when the target is your friend. Sound complicated? It is!
"Activity" is when you become friends with someone, join the site, "like" something, commented on something... the list goes on. Without activity display, a social network feels more like a MySpace than Facebook. But be careful... if you list each new activity all of your friends make, it can get clogged with redundant announcements. Learn how we devised a system that lets us smartly group recent activity taken by user, taxonomy term, or node.
Great social networks may be easy to use, but the logic behind true social networks is very complex.
The Details
- Building news feeds for friends and "followed" terms with Search API with Apache Solr
- How to let users "share" content and write on other users "walls".
- Creating an "activity" system that shows users activity around the site and can group similar activity together.
- Privacy & Permissions: How to give control where control is due.
About the Speaker
Jonathan is the Founder & CTO of ThinkDrop Consulting, a Drupal consulting company in Brooklyn, New York and has been developing with Drupal for more than 8 years, coding with PHP for more than 12 years, and building sites with HTML since 1997.
This session was originally given at DrupalCampNYC 10 in December of 2011 and repeated at NYCCamp in June 2012
Comments
I attended Jon's presentation of this topic at DrupalCampNYC 10 and found it very helpful. I know he's built additional social sites and advanced the state-of-the-art since that time, so this presentation should be able to expand on that one with more real-world experiences.
Building niche social networks (and distributed networks) is a particular interest of mine, and could be a major avenue of growth for Drupal in the future, so I'm likely to attend this session again in Portland.