Beginning Drupal 8
Todd Tomlinson - Beginning Drupal 8 (The Expert's Voice in Drupal) - 2015
Todd Tomlinson - Beginning Drupal 8 (The Expert's Voice in Drupal) - 2015
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Chapter 21<br />
Building a Community Site<br />
The ability for people to assemble in online communities has exploded over the past several years. There are<br />
online communities for nearly everything you can think of—from technology (think <strong>Drupal</strong>!), sports<br />
(e.g., fans of a soccer club), and entertainment (e.g., enthusiasts of a particular music genre), to food,<br />
nutrition, boating, flying, hiking, endangered animals, and thousands of other topics for which there<br />
are groups of people who gather in a virtual community to share ideas, ask questions, set up events, and<br />
connect. There are online communities focused around individual products, groups of products, and<br />
companies. There are also online communities sponsored by companies to help guide and direct those who<br />
purchase their goods and services. The opportunities are limitless; all it takes is two or more people and an<br />
idea to launch an online community.<br />
<strong>Drupal</strong> is an excellent platform for building an online community, and the <strong>Drupal</strong> Commons<br />
distribution (www.drupal.org/project/commons) provides an off-the-shelf solution that fulfills a vast<br />
majority of the functional requirements for online communities. In this chapter I’ll create an online<br />
community site focused on those who want to learn about <strong>Drupal</strong>. You can follow along and build the same<br />
site as a learning exercise, or you can use the example as a guide to create your own community site.<br />
Requirements for a Community Site<br />
As always, the place to start when creating any website is to identify the requirements for the site.<br />
The requirements for a community site are relatively common across all types of online communities:<br />
1. The capability to grow and create new subgroups organically within the<br />
community site.<br />
2. The capability to publish content.<br />
3. The capability to create and manage a wiki.<br />
4. The capability to author and publish information about events.<br />
5. The capability for users to create relationships and follow each other.<br />
<strong>Drupal</strong> Commons provides all of these capabilities as part of the base distribution.<br />
Installing <strong>Drupal</strong> Commons<br />
The first step in creating the corporate site is to install <strong>Drupal</strong> Commons. You can download the <strong>Drupal</strong><br />
Commons distribution from www.drupal.org/project/commons. As with previous examples of installing<br />
<strong>Drupal</strong>, you’ll need to expand the tar or zip file in the appropriate directory on your web server (check your<br />
web server’s documentation for the directory in which a site should reside on your web server platform).<br />
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