Create a site like Digg - Part2

In Part 1 we managed to make a very basic Digg clone with no programming in this part we will continue the no programming feel and add some more modules to our project, this is not an exhausted list by any means just an example of some additional modules. The next part of this series we will look at organising all your links again without code and themeing.

Making it User and Search engine friendly
Switching on Clean URLs, I’m not going to go into how you switch on clean URLs its several posts in itself and the Drupal handbook has it covered you can test if you already have them set in admin/settings run the clean URL test if you pass simply click enable. Even if you can’t get clean URL’s download Pathauto and Me modules and install them the same way we did in part 1 by unpacking them into the modules folder in your Drupal install and going to admin/modules and selecting them from the list. These 2 modules do similar things.

Pathauto is a fantasticly simple module that creates custom URLs from nodes so instead of our story nodes looking like www.example.com?q=node/1 you would get www.example.com?q=my_story_link_title or if you have clean urls enabled www.example.com/my_story_link_title the nice thing about Pathauto is it does this out of the box, you can however go to admin/settings/pathauto and change the paths it creates.

Me is a simple module that associates user related posts to the alias me, this means if a user visite www.example.com?q=user/me he would find his own profile, this really simple addition makes linkng to profiles and users content so much simpler.

The permanent Beta Site
In this scenario you run a closed site which is invitation only similar to Gmail with users sending out invites this scenario is a good starting scenario to help manage growth. The nice thing about this scenario is it becomes that little bit harder for spammers to join, and people are unlikely to recommend their favourite spammer to join. The downside is limited growth and you need to get a starting group together however if you were planning to do this style of site you should look at the following module

• Invite Friends

To get this module up you need to administer/user and set it to requires administrators approval, because the invite module overrides this setting it will mean only administrators and can directly add users, and users can invite other users, who once signed up are active immediately.

If you don’t have cron
Some systems don’t have cron jobs in which case you can try poor mans cron, in the past I have used poormans cron even when I do have cron running on the system.

Must haves Modules
This is the additional must have modules that make administrating and developing your site easier.

• XML Sitemap - Creates sitemaps on the fly which helps search engines find your content visit sitemaps.org for more details
• Google Analytics - Probably not a must have but certainly better then the inbuilt Drupal statistics you could just add the Javascript to your page template but we said no programming!
• Node Profile - allows you to define additional information to profiles such as URLs, names etc
• Legal - adds TOC during registration this is really important for European sites to comply with EU legal bits you must have a TOC and Privacy statement
• Login Toboggan - Allows you to modify how people register and login, including bypassing the usual email registration.

Other Articles in this Series
Want to Create a Digg like site with no programming?
Create a site like Digg - Part 3

Other Articles on the Venture Skills Network about Drupal
HReview a CCK example using contemplate
Drupal 5.0 goes Beta
5 Drupal Modules to Guarantee Drupal 5.0 Success
The Digg effect and can drupal survive it - looking at how drupal can cope with bandwidth spikes

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