Best Drupal Social Community Modules
Drupal, and its contributed social modules, is the perfect system to create a powerful, feature-rich, online social community or networking website, while limiting development expenses and time to get up and running. Here are the best Drupal modules, default and contributed, for social networking that LevelTen has utilized on our community websites:
User Relationships:
As the name says, this module allows users to create relationships with each other. As an admin, you can define relationship types, whether it's "Friend," "Connection," "Coworker," etc. and set either "one-way" or "two-way" relationships. On MadeLoud, an indie music social community, we set up "Friend" and "Fan" relationship types. Fans can have a one-way relationship type of "Fan" with an Artist, while Fans & Artists can have a mutal relationship of "Friends." There are several modules that integrate with the main User Relationships module allowing the utilization of Blocks, Views, Emails, and much more.
Privatemsg:
This module allows basic messaging between your users. It provides users a simple message archive, with ability to read, reply, and delete. In their Account Settings, users can select whether they would like to be notified of new private messages.
Messaging & Notifications:
The Notifications module allows users to subscribe to content on your site in order to be notified of new posts. For example, one of our current clients would like users to be able to subscribe to specific blog posts in order to be notified when new comments are posted. We will install the Notifications module & Messaging module to support this feature. The Messaging module is required, as it is a channel to support Notifications, but it also supports some really exciting ways for users to be notified. For example, Messaging can be tied in with social modules or services for Twitter, Instant Messaging, SMS, Privatemsg, etc. so that users can select by which method they would like to be notified when one of their subscriptions has new content.
Advanced Forum:
Drupal's core Forum module is as simple as they come. The Advanced Forum module extends the default Forum module by providing features and settings that you often see on other standalone forums.
Twitter:
The Twitter module, currently installed on LevelTen's website, connects to the Twitter API and allows user tweets to be displayed on the site in their profile or even in site blocks. It also allows you to set up an automatic tweet when new content is posted on your site.
User Points:
If you read my blog post on "Motivating with Reward: Getting Online Users to Participate," you would have read about SparkPeople.com and how they use "SparkPoints" to motivate users to interact with the site. The User Points module allows you to set a number of points for specific actions users complete on your site. For example, you might give 10 points for creating a blog post. What makes this feature especially powerful are the User Points Contributed Modules it works with to add additional functionality and settings.
