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Strategy for Developing Online Communities and Social Networks in Drupal

Mar 3 2010

Those "in the know" about Drupal realize that Drupal is far more than a content management system (CMS) even though it often gets categorized that way. Drupal as a CMS is more like one specific feature or type of use, of many. It's more of a platform, and on Drupal.org it's labeled as "Community plumbing" and an "open source content management platform".

Give Your Users an Onsite Bookmarking Tool

Feb 22 2010

The many widgets and tools available today makes it very simple to provide social bookmarking tools for content on websites. This makes it simple for visitors to your site to share your content with various services - Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg, and hundreds of others.

And while this can be really useful, it's more geared towards spreading content. It's more about marketing. It's very external-facing. The term social bookmarking is interesting too. While it certainly functions as a bookmark, it's different from other definitions of the term and previous uses of "bookmarking" when it comes to the web.

Feb 16 2010

A while back I found myself trying to explain to someone how a Drupal theme that was purchased was not going to result in an entire website being created simply by installing the theme. And I don't think the confusion was simply about content being added. The confusion seemed to be more centered on some very specific and robust features that were desired for the site. And simply put, the Drupal theme was not going to provide those features.

But that's not the fault of the Drupal theme. The particular Drupal theme was going to do it's specific job. And a very robust and/or highly customized Drupal theme may take some very specific features and modules into consideration.

Feb 9 2010

If you've built your Drupal site, there's a good change you're already using the incredibly useful PathAuto module. If you aren't, then a simple summary is that PathAuto helps you better manage URL creation by assigning rules. This is an efficient alternative to manually choosing a URL for every piece of content, even if you use the simple default rule of having the URL created based on the Title of the content item.

Stuck Cron in Drupal - Clear the Cache Too

Feb 8 2010

If you've ever had Cron get stuck in Drupal and wondered what to do, you've probably run across instructions to clear some variables in your Drupal database - specifically the cron semaphore. That generally solves the issue. But, if you've tried that and have not found it fixes the issue, there's another seemingly simple but useful step. Before you do anything else after deleting the the necessary variables, go to the Performance tab in Drupal and clear your cache. This will help ensure that the variables you just cleared don't go right back in!

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