What features will such a platform have? What modules provide these features? And what work is needed to wrangle these modules together?
Nobody goes to the front page. Everyone hangs out in the forum People don't use the chat, or the gallery Wants to have a dashboard on the front page - The latest shoutboxes - The latest forum posts - The Latest followed items - The latest blog comments - the latest group posts (organized by group on page) - Stats FAQs Need a way for newbies to understand what's available/get a lay of the land. Featured blog post/product review/product setup Need a way to build community - don't add too many features that people won't use Simplicity - Can't be overwhelming for new visitors Wants the important content to fit within one screen
Want people to find us easily Got to be easy! Can't take too much time.
Need a "sticky" site - needs to have content that people will want to revisit
Need an easy way to communicate. - email distro list? - Twitter-like communication
- Global communication
Direct communication
Events calendar
Needs to be easy to edit
Leader needs automation/prompts to stay on top of the community
The way that meetup sets up the next meeting at a scheduled time
Probably need a dues-paying or donation mechanism
Reduce the friction for people to participate
Don't make the users register in order to leave a comment or ask a question
Need to be able to find people in the community who can answer my particular questions (newbie podcaster versus someone who's looking for a microphone) Need a good feedback loop - direct feedback to the community organizer
Things we need to keep in mind What's important to the community? What are the features
admin
front end
user experience
advertising
design
content
general
bugs
categories one might be able to vote on
Contributions/"I can do" section
What I can contribute (&if I have help)
I wish Akismet stopped everything. It seems to be getting worse lately, so you'll also need: * Quick and easy blocking of users * Quick and easy blocking of IP's * Flagging of stories by users / trusted users * http://mollom.com/
There are a few key features that are important when setting up a community I thought I might add. My personal projects include a podcast network and an artist site that allows artists to share writing, images, audio, and video recordings. These two community sites are entirely different, and will have different needs. Of all the features I have jotted down these 5 seem to ring out as being baseline necessities.
1. Allow the admin the ability to select "featured" posts and content from within the community to share on the main page, while also providing an "autopilot" that would give the admin the option to have the top 5 or so most active threads, items, or posts from within the community automatically set on the front page as featured articles. If the admin so chooses, the system could provide them as "suggestions" for featured status bringing these hot topics to the admin's attention before feature status is granted.
2. Create or allow for the creation of separate RSS feeds for each category of content that a profile adds to the community. For example, if user A posts 50 of their photographs and 5 of their audio recordings, they should have a gallery separate from their music, podcasts, whatever. This would allow someone to direct their fans/followers to their art gallery without having their audio tracks jumbled in the mix. Having a different RSS feed would allow someone to subscribe to user's videos without getting every little twitter update summary, photo upload, etc.
3. It would be nice to have an interoperability built in with multiple forms of implementation. For example, if someone has an OpenID site running gnomepal, their users should be able to fairly easily shake hands with and import profiles from their other gnomepal accounts on other active sites. For admins that chose to opt out of OpenID, a primitive import/export could be made possible allowing users the ability to shake hands and set themselves up in the new community without having to re-enter all the information. Other possibilities using RSS, for example, could be possible pulling someone's profile from multiple sources into their Gnomepal community profile.
4. An admin should have a blanket ability to block certain strings in cases where a community is being barraged by outside interference. Let's say for example, that your site revolves around users sharing poetry. If you have the ability to block out phrases like "sucks" or "stupid" or other less polite nonsense, while allowing original posters the ability to keep those phrases in their posts, if for whatever reason their story has that term in it. One problem I'm seeing with community sites like Youtube for example, is that the site can't become a place of honest critique and idea sharing beyond the initial contribution when half of the comments made are unreasonable and unnecessary trolling. This one was hard to put into words, so forgive me if it doesn't make sense.
5. Users should have the ability to make the rights they chose to have on their content visible and present. Flickr has a great rights management program, and when you view a post from a user you know what license that user has selected to give their peers. This is missing from so many community sites out there and deserves a place in Gnomepal.
Thanks very much,
MR
Choose the wysiwyg editor for us! There are like 10 contrib modules and counting. It's confusing.
Starter content, kinda like Joomla! 1.5. Real content (not Lorem Ipsum), as in pages and stories that explains Drupal and help a new users get started.
Perhaps some getting started videos on the "welcome to your new Drupal site" page. Kind of like Flight Simulator's Learning Center, if anyone's familiar with that.
I think the system should have the ability to differentiate between the possibility of editor-originated content and user-generated content, and have moderation/promotion rules for both.