For a particular project I am working on, there was a need for a social news application that would have be stable, reliable and customisable for particular needs. The final app I decided on was the Drupal Drigg package, that extends the brillant Drupal CMS and converts it to exactly what I was after - a stable, open source social news site.
What I will outline below is some of the points I noted whilst I was installing it, and a few key searches and links I discovered along the way because it’s not as easy as one might think.
Getting The Right Package
Only just recently the Drigg team (after much hard work) released a version that is compatible with Drupal 6. The Drigg Package
for version 6 can be downloaded from here as an express package. However, its not a simple unpack and upload. The Drupal version that is included and now out of date. You will then need to go down and download all the latest Drupal updates, which I managed to upgrade to 6.8. These are security fixes as well, so do not think you can get away with not doing it.
Make Sure Clean URLs Work
For me this was the most difficult part of the install, mostly due to the fact that the mod_rewrite module wasn’t part of the hosting package I had chosen. Also, make sure that your .htaccess file has the required lines of code included. A sample drupal htaccess file is available from the Drupal website. Drigg will not work without Clean URLs correctly implemented.
Activate the Drigg Modules & Default Theme
The Drigg Modules and theme are not activated immediately, you need to log into your administration section and add the modules your website requires. Whilst this might take a while, it gives you complete control of how your social news site will function.
Make Sure You Set the Right Permissions for Your Users
Currently with the dev version I have up and running, only the administrator can create and submit stories. Once I have this issue figured out, I will post a quick guide on how to get working correctly.
The Next Steps
Once all this has been done, get your local friendly graphic designer to mock up a theme, and get your html/css expert to convert it into a theme (Don’t forget your Analytics tracking as well). And away you go - one custom social news site. Make sure you say thankyou to the Drupal/Drigg/Open Source community for their efforts as well.
