Drupal for communities: modules that matter
I was sitting with a neighborhood group in a coffee shop, laptops open, arguing about where to host their new community. Someone said Ning. Another said a Facebook Group. The oldest person in the room leaned in and asked a simple thing. Do we own our place, or are we just renting a corner of someone else’s mall? That question nudged us toward Drupal. Not because it is trendy, but because it lets you shape the house you live in. If your community needs rooms, rules, and identity, Drupal gives you the bricks.
If you are building a town square that lives on your own domain, these are the modules that keep the lights on and the chatter going. This is field tested stuff from projects that ship.
Start with the spine: content and navigation
Give people structure first, flair later. Pair CCK with Views to model the content your members will actually post. Events, meetups, stories, classifieds, you name it. Taxonomy keeps topics tidy. Pathauto and Token make clean URLs and readable patterns. For images, ImageField and ImageCache do the heavy lifting. If editors want rich text without headaches, use the WYSIWYG module and hook in TinyMCE or CKEditor.
Search matters the minute you have more than ten pages. On shared hosting, Drupal core search is fine to start. If you need speed and relevance, Apache Solr with the Solr module is a big step up. Add Faceted Search to let people filter by tag, type, or group.
Make it social: groups, signals, and feedback
Communities form around circles. Organic Groups gives you group pages, permissions, and subscriptions so members can rally around interests or neighborhoods. If you still want forums, use Advanced Forum for a friendlier look on top of core forum.
People need signals. VotingAPI plus Fivestar handles ratings. Flag adds bookmarks and follow like behavior. Private conversations run well with Privatemsg. For activity streams, look at Heartbeat or Activity so members see what just happened without hitting refresh all day.
Keep folks in the loop. Notifications and Subscriptions send updates on new content or replies. If email deliverability is a worry, wire up Messaging so you can route mail through a proper gateway later.
Onboarding, trust, and safety
Open doors attract spam. Mollom is the easiest filter I have used for comments and forms. Pair it with CAPTCHA or reCAPTCHA for the noisy days. Want easy signup? Leave OpenID on for the crowd that already uses it, and consider Invite if you want members to bring friends.
For moderation and content flow, Workflow handles states and transitions, and Rules lets you react to events like new posts in a group. If you need revisions without granting full edit rights, check Revisioning.
Deploy, tune, and grow
Your future self will thank you for Features to package configuration and Strongarm to capture variables. I like Context to place blocks and change layouts based on where users are in the site. If your traffic is mostly anonymous, Boost is pure gold for page caching on shared hosting. On a VPS, consider Memcache and the Pressflow core for better performance. Keep cron steady with Elysia Cron when tasks grow.
Before you go module crazy, check project pages for release status and recent commits. Stable beats shiny nine days out of ten.
Manager notes: what to decide before you install anything
Start with purpose. Write one clear sentence about why your community exists and who it serves. That sentence decides whether you need Organic Groups or just tags, whether ratings help or just invite noise, and how strict you should be with moderation.
Define roles early. A simple setup is member, editor, and moderator. Map what each role can create, edit, delete, and approve. Fewer roles means fewer surprises. Document these choices so new staff can help without a tour.
Budget for maintenance. Modules save time up front, but they need care. Plan a monthly check to review updates, clear logs, test backups, and prune spam. If you expect big growth, set aside time to move search to Solr and to add caching beyond core. Own the data. Keep exports handy.
Your turn: build a weekend proof
Pick three outcomes your community needs. For example, members can form interest groups, people get email alerts, and new posts show up in an activity feed. Install CCK, Views, Organic Groups, Notifications, and either Heartbeat or Activity. Add Pathauto and Mollom. Then invite five real users to try it. Watch where they click. Fix that. Share what you learned in the comments and list the modules you kept. The best Drupal sites are the ones that choose less and ship sooner.