Building a community Drupal site

Meeting Notes

Today, Advantage Labs spent the day building a generalized install profile to solve many of those needs. This profile beta was built in one day using 3 experienced people (what, once upon a time would have been a $x,000,000 site). Advantage Labs will be refining this profile with help of beta testers and community feedback and will also contribute it back to the community. Additionally, Advantage Labs will be offering a managed hosting service which uses this profile, thus cutting down on administrative overhead and module maintenance / upgrades. (thanks! - great value-add service!)

The presentation started with a Caveat Emptor: Drupal is a powerful tool – but very complex. There is plenty of rope to hang yourself with, as it were. It took 3 very experienced people a full day to get this up and running. Again – something like this might have cost $x,000,000 5+ years ago – but there's a reason for that – the complexity of interrelated pieces and need for careful planning and management are non-trivial... no matter how powerful the tool.

We saw some functionality, including custom user profile which were tied into Google Maps (therefore providing pretty cool search result possibilities), custom discussion groups (a CCK type), custom Events (another CCK type) and more.

Here's a brief list of the modules which were enabled in this profile:

• Bio (possibly CVS head – patched by Allie)
  • Users: profile module – not node-based , bio is node-based. Nodes are nice...
• CCK
  • image field
  • imagecache
  • date
  • node ref
  • option widgets
  • text
  • user ref
  • view field
  • Content Types created: Image, Discussion (comments plus 'fivestar' rating), News, Events, Page, Profile, Group
• Core
  • aggregator
  • blog
  • color
  • comment
  • contact
  • help
  • menu
  • poll
  • search
  • statistics
  • taxonomy
  • tracker
  • upload
• image
  • imagecache – scale, crop, resize, etc.
  • NOT image
• TinyMCE
  • two profiles – auth and admin
• JavaScript
  • JS Calendar
  • JavaScript Tools
• Location
  • gmap
  • geo (new today by m fredrickson)
  • gmap location (not enabled)
  • gmap macro builder (not enabled)
  • gmap views integration
  • location
  • location views
• Mail
  • mime mail
  • mailing list manager
    • ezmlm - talks to ezmlm (deemed more scalable than php-based systems)
      • also – php-based email more easily flagged as spam?
  • newsletter
  • send
• Organic Groups
  • og
  • og vocab
• Other
  • bio
  • google sitemap
  • imce
  • menutrim (not working?)
  • panels
  • pathauto
  • simplemenu
  • textimage
• Captcha
• Views
  • calendar
  • views
  • views bonus pack
  • views rss
  • views ui
• Voting
  • voting api
  • voting api actions
  • fivestar

Also – access roles setup (1 additional layer - someone between user 1 and authenticated -- a content administration role)
Theme tweaking
Several additional blocks, such as a 'recent news' block
Lots and lots of configuration and refinement of options.

That's about all my notes have -- but I'm sure I missed items. Others - please refine with your recollections.

Thanks again to Allie, Mark and Bobbi of Advantage Labs for presenting!

Drew Gorton
Gorton Studios

Original Post: http://groups.drupal.org/node/2791