Introduction
Welcome to the third post in the series of Drupal maintenance support plans 8 and Distributions. In the first post we discussed about what Drupal maintenance support plans Distributions are and what are some of the prominent distributions available in Drupal maintenance support plans 8. In the second post, we explored Lightning Drupal maintenance support plans 8 distribution by Acquia. We discussed about how Lightning can be leveraged to create amazing publishing experiences and how it proves to be an ideal distribution to get started with Drupal maintenance support plans 8 development.
About Open Social
Open Social is a distribution built in Drupal maintenance support plans 8 to create social communities and intranets. It comes with an array of features and functionalities useful in building any social framework. In the Drupal maintenance support plans community, Open Social is positioned as a successor of Drupal maintenance support plans Commons. Drupal maintenance support plans Commons is a Drupal maintenance support plans 7 distribution that is an out of the box community collaboration website.
Since Open Social is built in Drupal maintenance support plans 8, it wraps in itself an array of possibilities leveraging the features of Drupal maintenance support plans 8. It is interesting to see that the distributions built in Drupal maintenance support plans 8 in general are much more light weight as compared to the distributions built in Drupal maintenance support plans 7. Hence, if we compare Open Social with Drupal maintenance support plans Commons, the latter is relatively a heavier distribution and ships with many modules that the user may not really need while building the website. Open Social on other hand is a platform that is generic yet useful.
With the advent of Drupal maintenance support plans 8, Drupal maintenance support plans is evolving into a product and Open Social is an apt use case of the same. We also, at Drupal Update, believe in using Drupal maintenance support plans as a product development framework. We have leveraged Drupal maintenance support plans to build a product that helps you expedite project estimations. We plan to continue to use Drupal maintenance support plans to build products.
Out of the Box Features in Open Social
User Profiles and Signup
Signup – Open signup or Closed Signup are easily configurable
Profile Setup – You can add your full name, image, interests and biography along with location, address etc.
User Roles – There are four user roles available, namely, Authenticated User, Administrator, Content Manager and Site Manager. This is the perfect recipe to build a community in which you require a team to manage the content and other sections of the community platform.
User Groups
Group module of Drupal maintenance support plans 8 – This module has extensively been used. Conceptually it is a replacement of Organic Groups module available in Drupal maintenance support plans 7.
Ability to create an Open Group for discussions, add members, create events and topics.
Content Types and Structure
Two content types – Events and topics. Taxonomy has been used to create different topics. This architecture makes Open Social light weight to install and use.
Blogs, News etc. are all same content type as topic but have different taxonomy.
Stream (or Timeline) and Commenting
Users can create posts on the timeline (or stream) which is then visible to all other users. Currently just text can be posted on the stream. We can expect the ability to add media as a post on Stream in future.
All the recent activities by the user such as creating an event, enrolling in an event, joining a group etc. are showcased in Stream.
Commenting is available on events, posts and user groups too.
Media Management
Ability to add images wherever needed such as profile and events.
File System, Images Styles and all other media configurations needed to add, resize and adjust images in built.
Notifications and Search
Extensive notification center has been built by messaging feature.
Ability to search for Content, Users and Events.
Events Management
Ability to Create, Publish, Un-publish events. Groups specific events can also be created.
Users can enroll for events and be notified about it.
Responsive and Multilingual Support
Translation Module has been used for Multilingual support
It is out of the box responsive and mobile first.
Main Contributed Modules Used
Many contributed modules have been used to build Open Social, some of the prominent Drupal maintenance support plans 8 modules used are as follows
Group
Address
Bootstrap
Messages
Composer used heavily and is needed for installation and updating the platform
Future Product Roadmap
Open Social is constantly evolving and following are some of the features which are there in the product roadmap and can be expected in future.
Closed and Secret Group. Currently only Open Group is supported
Aggregating the notifications to enhance the user experience
Mention – To be able to tag or mention a user with @.
LDAP Integration
Progressive Web App – For push notifications, offline usage capability
Conclusion
Open Social has the right blend of features needed to build a social community and is surprisingly quite light weight to use. There are many features which the users may require while building a social community but shipping the distribution with all of them is probably not the right approach. Hence, Open Social proves to be an apt platform to get started with building your community or intranet and add more features as and when needed.
Source: New feed
