Site recipe: Building a community portal

Revised Sep 7, 07
Note: Since 6.x is nearly in beta, I should mention that this is being done in 5.x.

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.

If you'd like to peek at any of this stuff from the user's perspective, please use the dev site. I don't want a bunch of test accounts on my live site. You can play around all you want on the dev site as it will periodically get wiped out with a copy of the live site.

A note about support... I have spent quite a bit of time, far more than I ever expected, answering questions about the user profiles. The thought of multiplying it by several more tutorials is overwhelming. I'm not cutting off support, but I may be more selective in what I answer and will likely take even longer than I have been. I need to balance the time I spent answering questions with getting stuff done on the site. If you have a question that isn't specific to my tutorials, please use the regular Drupal support options as you'll have a lot more people available to answer.

Michelle