10 essential modules for building a community website with Drupal
If you are planning to build a community website then build it with Drupal. Its core design makes it easy to build a virtual community and most of the functionality required for that is built into it. This can be extended using the following 10 essential modules for building a community website with Drupal. If you want to build your community website in Drupal, contact us
Also have a look at the Top 5 most popular modules in Drupal 6
Logintoboggan
The standard Drupal login system needs to be tweaked for creating a community website. The Logintoboggan module provides an easy way to do that by altering the standard Drupal login procedure and gives your site’s members the ability to login immediately and to login with their own username or email address and many such options.
Download Logintoboggan
Profile Setup
A community website needs to provide users with the ability to create a profile. With the Profile Setup module you can extend the standard Drupal profile system to allow users to pass through a profile setup process in which they can add information about themselves to their profile and most importantly upload a profile picture.
Download Profile Setup
DrupalChat
Drupal Chat adds chat functionality to your Drupal community website. Site members can use it to chat with other members either publicly or in a private chatroom. The chat app comes off as a sleek chat bar at the bottom right of the browser. Drupal chat features notifications for important events and also retains a log of chats. It is also designed to integrate with User Relationships and the Friendlist Module and many other features.
Download Drupal Chat
Organic Groups
This is a very important module for a community website. This module enables users to create their own groups and manage these groups. Uses can subscribe to these groups. Each group can have a separate home page where subscribers can communicate with each other using Drupal’s usual node types. Membership to these groups can be selective - members need to get the approval of the group moderators to join the group and the module provides a lot of preferences to configure these groups.
Download Organic Groups
Invite
If a community has to expand it has to do so by bringing in new members. The Invite module allows users of your community website to send invitations to new users to join your site and to track these invitations.
Download Invite
Fivestar
Fivestar module is based on the VotingAPI module and provides users with functionality to rate all types of content. Fivestar gives a voting widget to nodes and comments with Jquery rollover effects and AJAX no-reload voting. This module supports anonymous users and also provides spam protection to prevent bogus votes and is compatible with all versions of Jquery.
Download Fivestar
Comment Notify
If an anonymous user has made a comment on a node in a Drupal site, then the comment notify module can be used to send notification emails to those posters whenever there are new comments on nodes which they have commented. This way anonymous users can be brought back to the website and possibly be converted to registered users helping the site to grow. It also helps in building a blog comment community.
Download Comment Notify
Author Pane
Author Pane displays a block with information about each user. It uses a format that is typically found in most forum posts and can be used to display the user profile picture, profile name, contact links, online status and join date. Other modules like Organic Groups and User Relationships can feed it additional information using the Drupal preprocess system.
Download Author Pane
User Points
This module provides an API for providing a system for users to gain or lose points whenever they do some specific action on the website. This module is build to work with other contributed modules that are build to extend its functionality to fully take advantage of this point based system. Communities can thrive on a reward system for its members and this what this module intends to achieve.
Download User Points
User Relationships
User Relationships allows administrators of your Drupal website to create relationship types for the registered members of its site. These relationships can be either mutual or a one-way relationship with respective characteristics of the relationship type. The module also provides options for modifying permissions and characteristics of the relationship and also comes with addon modules that extend its functionality.
Download User Relationships
