Site recipe: Building a community portal

November 3, 2008: This tutorial sort of petered out as I refocused my efforts into Advanced Forum and Advanced Profile Kit. Sometime early next year I plan on moving Coulee Region ONLINE into D6 and resume work on it. At that point, I'll be revamping this site recipe. In the mean time, I'm leaving the old pages in case someone still finds them useful.

When I started work on Coulee Region ONLINE, I planned on writing up a detailed summary of what all went into it to post on the Drupal Showcase forum. As I got more into the project and spent untold hours trying to make my ideas work, often with poor or no documentation, and with a lot of help from the nice folks on IRC, I decided to go beyond that. I am in the process of creating a series of tutorials hits the major points of my site to show you how I did it. While I will try to make the tutorials as useful as possible, they are not drop in solutions. It's expected that you are familiar with Drupal and willing to take the time to research things you don't understand.

This is an ongoing and long term effort so don't expect it to be done anytime soon.

Planned tutorials (in no particular order):

• User profiles - This tutorial is basically done. I've been tweaking it when I get feedback on something being unclear or not working quite right, but it's been successfully used by many people. I have a 3rd version in the works, but that will be an alternate method rather than a replacement.
• Rating and reviewing - A big part of my site is allowing the users to give feedback on everything. I've written up a mini tutorial for how I handled rating and reviewing in one step.
• Tweaking the forums - This will cover all the modules and tweaks I used in my forums.
• Area (business) directory - You can see this work in progress here. There is a lot of views customizing going on here so I'm going to write up how to do it.
• Handling images - There are quite a few ways to deal with images in Drupal. I'll go through what I did and why as soon as I figure it out myself :).
• Other ideas - I might also go into smaller things like adding an event calendar and such, depending on how long it takes to hit the big topics.

Michelle