I'll be maintaining a new site, called DrupalForBeginners.com, dedicated to helping the first time Drupaler get up and running.

I'll be posting some tutorials to that site over the next several weeks and will not be posting any more Drupal tutorials to TopicBlender.com.

Check out DrupalForBeginners over the next few weeks to see where its progress is.

So i've written before about how much i love mindmapping software, such as MindJet, or the open-source FreeMind. I recently stumbled across a web-based mindmapping site that is truly excellent.

It's called Mind42 and it's free, at least as of this writing. It's ultra "web 2.0" and it feels quite like a desktop app. You can attach notes, files, and links to nodes of your mindmap. You can open it up for collaboration and allow other to shove your mind-map around.

It will import a wide variety of other mindmap formats, including FreeMind files. In my usage, the FreeMind map came across with no loss of fidelity. It also allows easy publishing of your mindmaps to the web, letting you send a url to anyone you want to view your mindmap without installing any software or downloading any files.

Check it out »

I'm no linux expert. In fact i'm kind of a linux newbie. My primary OS is windows vista, though my main work laptop is a macbook pro (running bootcamp / vista).

For the past several years I've toyed with linux — red hat, suse, and more recently opensuse and ubuntu (and it's kde based variant, kubuntu).

The latest revisions i've installed of ubuntu (7.10) and opensuse (10.3) were extremely impressive. Installed on a laptop, both detected/installed all my device drivers. A clean install, with no internet connection, successfully detected and configured my screen, chipset, trackpad, wireless and sound. Windows doesn't even get all those most of the time.

I've used ubuntu for a couple of years now, but a few months ago heard about OpenSuse. Some guy was giving it glowing reviews and comparing its ease of installation and use to ubuntu, so i thought I'd give it a shot.

Background
I signed up with drupal value hosting in December 2007.

Initially, i was blown away by the performance their server's offered. I'm pleased to say that my feelings have not changed. I've since entirely cancelled my MediaTemple GridService account, and dropped down to a basic hosting package at 1and1 as my 'fall-back' in case DVH should have issues.

Their customer base has been rapidly increasing, but server performance and responsive support have not changed.

I've learned they don't offer FFMPEG, and was initially disappointed. However, I'm glad FFMPEG isn't offered, as the substantial server resources it requires could easily cause a noticable 'bad neighbor effect'.

I have 2 packages with them, the valuePrivateIP package, and the World's Best Hosting package.

Both seem equally snappy.

Soapbox

Now that you've got the basic framework for your community site and user profiles you'll want to add some modules that make your site more interactive. Giving users things 'to do' is essential for any community website.

In part 1 we already discussed some basic modules, including buddylist and privatemessage. These are pretty straightforward and don't require a whole lot of configuration.

The modules we'll discuss here are a bit more involved, and we'll talk about customizing them for your site's needs.

Your site may require different functionality than this, but these are some key features many community sites will use.

• User-based URLs
• Rich text editing
• User photos
• User blogs
• Forums
• A voting / rating system

User-based URLs

If you've never used mind-mapping software, you're missing out on a great way to quickly organized your thoughts, brainstorming sessions, high level site-maps, etc. Mind mapping tools allow you to rapidly group ideas, created structured trees, and easily move ideas from one parent to another.

I've used MindJet Mind Manager for a few years now, and it's a truly great tool. It's 'lite' edition runs 100 bucks and the pro edition runs 350.

A friend of mine recently introduced me to an open source variant called FreeMind. It lacks some of the more advanced features and OS integration that Mindjet offers, but for 95% of my mind mapping uses, it works just fine.

It's a java app, and generally i don't like java apps as they often take longer to launch, but FreeMind fires up surprisingly fast.

here's a screenshot:

I'm playing with the location and gmap modules for Drupal 5, and i have to say they're really amazing tools.

This site I'm working on, ThorntonHub.com (very much in beta, it's existence largely just to play with location / gmap) allows lots of map-based interactions without knowing much about the google map api.

You can generate map "views", showing any kind of location based information you want, and you can specify what fields to surface in the preview popup.

Right now, all the site really does is allows users to register, add restaurants in the area, and comment on / rate other restaurants.

Once a user enters a restaurant with an address, location module utilizes google maps to geocode the address, and stores lat/lon coordinates for the node. This allows users to effectively put their pin on the map, without them having to know the lat/lon, and without you having to know how to use google maps to geocode.

Pretty handy i think.

In part one we discussed the basic Drupal install, some minor customization and a few community-centric modules. Now we’ll be moving on to user profiles and customizing the default user profile page layout supplied by drupal.

First off, make sure you have the Profile module enabled. This is a core drupal module that allows you to extend the information collected for registered users. Once profile is enabled, head over to Administer -> User management -> Profiles. From here you can add whatever features you feel would be valuable for community on your site. You may want to add first / last name, state, ‘about me’ and the like.

Out of the box, Drupal is a pretty community-oriented CMS. It natively supports role-based logins, you can create custom user roles, assign whatever permissions you like, and assign any number of fields to a user profile. This is the first part in a (most likely) 3 part series on setting up a community website using Drupal. It assumes at least a basic understanding of drupal and doesn’t go into the granular how-to’s of basic setup that you can find on Drupal.org.

Requirements:

• Decent Drupal Hosting
  

Most of you probably have heard of, or used 37signals' Basecamp. It's a great Project Management tool, and i've used it on a number of client projects. It's a subscription based, hosted service with various packages based on number of users, features, etc.

After using Basecamp for a while i heard about ActiveCollab, an open source software package offering much of Basecamp's core functionality. What made it most appealing to me was it's cost (free) and it's self-hostable implementation. I'd rather install an app on my own servers and 'own' my data than rely on a hosted solution that could close its doors or kill my access to data at the flip of a switch.

However, at version 1.0, ActiveCollab abandoned its open-source roots and moved to a subscription based business model. That's fine and well, and I hope they make tons of money, but they no longer had much differentiation from Basecamp.