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.

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

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
  

I've been playing with drupal as a base for a fishing community website, TroutShout.com. I love fly fishing, so this seemed like a perfect sandbox for pushing drupal around a bit.

Many modules and hacks later, i have a pretty full-featured community website. Next week i'll be posting the first part of a basic 'how-to' guide that should help other new drupal developers deploy community websites with a bit of a head start.

Update: 07/14/2008