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
  I recommend Drupal Value Hosting
• Drupal
• At least a beginner level experience with Drupal

The Basic Install
To start, you’ll need to download the latest version of drupal and install it on your webserver. Go through the requisite installation, and editing of files / folders and permissions. After getting the core up and running I’d suggest making a new role, “Administrator”, and assigning your primary admin user that role. Administrator, Authenticated User and Anonymous will be sufficient for many basic community sites.

Next you’ll probably want to turn on clean URLs, which is not enabled by default. This is more than a nicety, it is valuable for SEO and makes urls more understandable for users. After that you’ll want to start enabling some of the core modules that are not enabled by default.

Enable Core Modules
Navigate over to Administer -> Modules. You’ll probably want to enable the following modules:

• Blog: Allows users to create and maintain their own blogs.
• Comments: Provides a mechanism for comments to be added to Drupal nodes.
• Forum: Drupals basic, functional but no-frills forum.
• Profile: The groundwork for user-customizable profiles
• Tracker: Allows users to track their site activity, comments, posts, etc.
• Poll: You may not need this, but it provides a simple voting/poll mechanism.

After you enable modules, you need to remember to go to Administer -> User Management -> Access Control and grant users permission to view and/or edit these newly activated modules.

Get User-Contributed Modules
First I’ll list off the modules that I’d consider to be must-haves.

• Views: You will, at some point, require use of this module that allows creation of custom pages and blocks.
• Image: allows upload of images and automatic creation of pre-defined thumbnail sizes
• Privatemsg: A site-messaging systems with options for email alerts etc.
• Buddylist: Allows users to add buddies (views can utilize buddylist to create pages or blocks that show an active user their buddies’ recent activity)

OK, there's part 1, this forms the basic platform that we'll build a community site on. In part 2 we'll cover the additional modules needed to add the community-style funtionality users expect from a community site. Part 3 will expand on creating custom user profile pages, creating views, and pushing around some code to make the site do what we want.