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Quick peek into Drupal Commons
I was excited to see today that Acquia finally released Drupal Commons, their Drupal distribution for social networking sites. This is pretty welcome news; Acquia's engineering ninjas and product management ninjas can add a lot of spit and polish to this languishing part of Drupal.
I'm especially interested in the set of Contrib modules that Acquia chose to deliver social networking. The Darwinian survival of Contrib modules is endlessly fascinating. Will they use activity stream or heartbeat, user relationships or flag, notifications/messaging or subscriptions? A vote of confidence from Acquia can make the difference between a module surviving or perishing.
So, I quickly downloaded the code and dove into the /profiles directory. Here are all the modules that Acquia includes in the distro ...
Contrib
admin_menu features link tagadelic_views ajax_load filefield messaging tagging apachesolr flag notifications token better_formats freelinking og transliteration calendar getid3 og_aggregator user_relationships cck heartbeat og_statistics user_terms chart image panels userpoints context imageapi password_policy userpoints_nc context_og imagecache pathauto userpoints_user_picture ctools imagecache_actions rules vertical_tabs date imagecache_profiles shoutbox views devel imagefield skinr wikitools diff insert strongarm wysiwyg editablefields jquery_ui tagadelic
Some thoughts on this list:
- Chart is a small handy module for offloading all your chart generation to Google Charts. Nice choice here.
- WYSIWYG and CKEditor get the nod here as the least offensive WYSIWYG editor.
- Context AND Panels are included. So much for the Cage Match.
- Flag is one handy module. I'm not yet sure how its used here, but its inclusion is not at all surprising.
- Heartbeat gets the nod over Activity Stream. I am a bit surprised by this. Guess I should dig more into heartbeat.
- Imagefield and insert are the picks here. Some folks choose IMCE, but I've long preferred these quicksketch gems.
- Organic groups powers the group functionality. Not sure there are worthy alternatives in Contrib.
- Password policy should be classified as torture. It forces humans to use unnatural passwords that mix punctuation and capital letters and integers. Even worse, it can expire your password every x days. Great for organizations that detest their customers or employees and wish they would just stay off the site.
- Tagging is new to me. Looks pretty nifty. It suggests taxonomy terms based on your content.
Features
acquia_network_subscription commons_core commons_notifications
Features module continues to get more popular. At this point, it is clear that this exportables is Drupal's solution for our long standing deployment problem. It's also great for sharing chunks of functionality. I've not yet poked around to see what these Features do.
Custom
commons quant user_relationships_rules
- I looked at quant module but haven't grokked it yet. Something about analytics. I'm guessing that it isn't fully baked yet, or else Acquia would have put it in Contrib.
- user_relationships_rules is a tiny glue module which provides Rules integration into UR.
Patches
It is a fact of life that you need to change Contrib module code and even core code from time to time. Commons does this in a responsible way, with a PATCHES.txt file pointing to each drupal.org issue and patch thats been applied. Angie Byron wrote a fine article on this topic.
I am not an Acquia employee, nor an expert in social networking with Drupal. Take all this with a grain of salt.
Moshe is one of the most senior and accomplished members of the Drupal community. He started committing code to Drupal in 2001. He is the 
Mike has given much to the Drupal community since first contributing in 2003. He's the wiz behind the 
I too had a poke around with a fresh install of Commons this morning. I have to say that it has a lot of potential, but I wasn't overly "wowed". There was nothing that made this unique. Commons is uninspiring and unoriginal. Don't get me wrong, I look forward to the rest of the community to take it to the next level, but I was kind of hoping for more from Acquia out of the gate. I was also hoping for more from TopNotchThemes with the theme itself. I found it bland and cluttered. I ended up trying out Celadon and Marina (Other Fusion-based themes) and there are much nicer with Commons, than the Commons theme (with a bit of tweaking for the distro, of course).
> Guess I should dig more into heartbeat.
If you are already checking it, give Message a spin. It's built on CTools, exportable and translatable. It's usage statistics is very poor, but I think it's because I don't do enough P.R. for it.
I would like to delete all code for exporting and declaring data types in heartbeat and leave it up to ctools. So heartbeat would have features export by default.
The only problem here is that it should be another branch, since lot of things will be broken for people who have the exported data in their modules.
What's the opinion on this? Should i just do it?
I poked around Commons a bit and was impressed and disappointed at the same time. I think they have a very good social networking solution but it is only "a" solution. And I guess that's all it really can be because social networking isn't just one thing.
I've had people asking me for years to make a social networking install profile and there have been other attempts, including GSOC, by other people. The attempts always fizzle out and so I pinned my hopes on Commons being the one to do it, the one I could point people to when they wanted a social network in a box. But here's the thing: they did it without many of the modules that I consider essential to social networking. Not just mine but others as well.
What they have works and works well but it's not going to be the solution for everyone. This isn't a complaint against it but more of a realization that a social network in a box that makes everyone happy is just not going to happen. There are so many variables, so many different opinions on what makes a good social network.
The answer may be making lots of different ones so there's more choice. But I think the reality will be that people will want some of one and some of another. So we're back to custom solutions again, building each site out of the building blocks of modules rather than a turnkey solution.
That's not necessarily a bad thing if you like to build but is going to disappoint the people who want it all handed to them so they can just turn on their site and run with it.
Michelle
I agree with Michelle.
I've mentioned before that I am eventually planning to build a social networking distribution, and I intend it to cast a wider net than Commons currently does. At the very least, I think it's not a stretch to say I have a better picture of what the typical SN modules are.
However, having said that -- Commons strikes me as not a Social Networking distribution, although it sort of bills itself that way. It is very much Social Enterprise, meaning designed for corporate sites. And there's nothing wrong with that, and in that light Commons' choice of modules isn't too out-of-touch (except for Heartbeat over Activity -- apparently AJAX-y-ness was prioritized over Drupal-y-ness).
Will write a more complete blog post on Commons and SN distributions in general sometime this week.
I came to this post out of a reference from one of the Acquia Drupal Common users. Just discovered the Project 2 days ago and I' not a developers and not an Acquia affiliate, just an old stubborn Drupal addicted Drupal.org member. Honestly I was really impressed by the intentional use of standard Drupal core and some, maybe quite a lot, contributed modules. It gave me really, after my quick local test install, the possibility to get an overview and start to add my custom touch, to theme, to modules and what ever, finding my self in a very confident structure. I think this project will really help those that are not Drupal Proof to boost in their Drupal learning curve and see what you can realize with Drupal out of the Box. Of course I well know the existence of other similar project (i.e. Open Atrium etc.) but this effort coming from Acquia show us that the Dries's Opensource Philosophy have his Crusaders and I'm really happy about.
I have been looking for ways in upgrading my existing community (built in drupal) site into drupal commons. It seems to me that it can be only a fresh install of commons and not an upgrade from earlier drupal