Legacy Drupal Commons 1.x-2.x

Drupal Commons is the open alternative social business software, and enables organizations to quickly build content-rich community web experiences for its internal and external clients. Drupal Commons' collaborative environment brings together blogs, wikis, calendars, and much more to create productive interactions among employees, customers, and the web at a lower cost than other solutions.

Concepts

If you're unfamiliar with Drupal, on which Drupal Commons is based, here are several key concepts to help you during your experience with Drupal Commons:

How do I add information to my site?

Information that you want to present to your visitors is called content. Users can select from a set of content types when they create content, each of which has different attributes. Drupal Commons provides pre-defined content types for blog entries, documents, discussions, wiki pages, events, and polls. A specific instance of a content type is called a node, for example, a specific blog entry or a specific wiki page. Drupal Commons displays content in various places around your community site.

What can I use to organize similar content and users?

In Drupal Commons, content should be created in groups. Groups are places where a community of users interested in a topic can create content about that topic, and interact with each other using status messages. Community members join groups they wish to participate in. Administrators can make groups that are open to the public, or tightly restrict their membership and content.

How do I help visitors navigate my website?

Menus let your site visitors navigate to other web pages on your site. While Drupal allows any number of menus to be defined and displayed on your site, Drupal Commons primarily defines one menu, called Primary links. Drupal Commons displays the menu as a navigation bar in the header of your community site, and the menu content changes for different classes of users, such as administrators, logged in users, and anonymous site visitors.

Installing or upgrading Drupal Commons

You can install Drupal Commons on any operating system platform that supports Drupal and its required xAMP stack. For detailed instructions on how to install Drupal Commons in your environment, see Installing Drupal Commons on a new server.

You can also upgrade your existing Drupal Commons 1.7 installation to Drupal Commons 2.x.

Using Drupal Commons

When you're getting started with Drupal Commons, you might first decide to customize your site to use your logo and style choices. Or you can start to add users and groups, and do the design later. It's your choice in how you want to start with Drupal Commons.

Use the following topics, in the order that you need them, to help you become more familiar with Drupal Commons 2.x, and how it's used:

Administering Drupal Commons

Admin menu

Administrative users can open and use the admin menu to configure the website and its content, as well as manage the website's users.

To access the admin menu, complete the following steps:

Log in to your Drupal Commons site as a user with administrative privileges.
Click the tool icon in the corner of the web page.

The admin menu appears as a black bar along the edge of the page.

Changing the Drupal Commons interface

Changing the site logo

The home page of your website and all of its subpages have the Drupal Commons logo by default. To replace the logo with your company or organization's logo, complete the following steps:

From the admin menu, select Administer > Site building > Themes. The Themes page opens.
Locate the theme with the "Default" option selected, and then click the configure link for that theme.
Scroll down the page to the Logo image setting section, and then upload your logo in the Upload logo image field.
After you upload your logo, click Save configuration.

Your website home page and all of its subpages now display your new logo to all site visitors.

Themes

The look and the feel of your site is its theme. Themes control the background, the colors, the text, the font, the formatting and several other effects. During the installation process, you must select a theme for Drupal Commons to use for your site. This theme choice is not permanent, as you can choose a different theme for your site at a later time.

To select a different theme for your site, from the admin menu, select Switch theme to see a list of available themes. After you select a new theme, click Save configuration to have Drupal Commons apply the theme to your site.

Managing site content

Creating site content

Information that you want to present to your visitors is called content. Users can select from a set of content types when they create content, each of which has different attributes. Drupal Commons provides pre-defined content types for blog entries, documents, discussions, wiki pages, events, and polls.

As an example, complete the following steps to create a blog entry visible to all of the users on the Drupal Commons web site:

Note: While each content type has its own distinct set of attributes, they're created using a similar process.

Log in to your website.
From the admin menu, select Community > Blog posts.

The Blog posts page opens.
Ensure that Blog entry is selected in the drop-down menu to the left of the Create button, and then click Create.

The Create Blog entry page opens.
Enter the Title and Body for the new blog entry.
Click Save.

You can also create content that is only visible to users in a group. To do this, select the group to view its content, and then click Create in the group with the appropriate content type selected.

Editing content

If you save your content as a draft, at some point you’ll want to publish it, making it available on your site. You may also have published it already and discovered a problem that calls for further revisions. Whether the content was saved or published, you can edit it at any time, or even unpublish it if you need to.

Use any of these methods to open the edit page for a content node:

Editing from the Content page

Note: This method is only available to users with the content manager role.

From the admin menu, select Administer > Content management > Content. The Content page opens.
Find the content you want to edit, and then click the edit link on the same row as the content node name, to the right.

Editing from the content's URL

Go to the URL for the content that you want to edit.
Select the Edit tab. (You only can see this tab if you have the permission to edit this content node.)

Editing from the context menu

Move your cursor over the content. A gear icon appears to the right of the content node.
Click the gear icon.

After you edit your content, click Save.

Publishing content

Users cannot see content nodes that you create on your Drupal Commons site until you publish them.

To publish a content node, edit the node, and select Published in the Publishing options vertical tab at the bottom of the page. Click Save to make the page visible to all users.

Deleting content

To remove content from your Drupal Commons site, edit the content, scroll to the bottom of the edit page, and then click Delete. A confirmation page appears. Click Delete to permanently remove the content from the site.

Adding a page to the website outside of a group

If you have a specific web page that you do not want to display inside of a group, such as an "About Us" page, administrative users can create a normal web page, and then add it to the navigation menu.

To create a web page, complete the following steps:

From the admin menu, select Create content > Page. The Create Page page opens.
In the Title field, enter the title of the page. This title appears in the page header and in the browser title bar.
Create content for the page in the Body field. You can format the content in this field using the formatting toolbar at the top of the field.
In the Menu link title field, enter the name that you want to appear in the menu.
Examine the Parent item field. The default value is <Primary links>, which means that this menu item will appear on the top navigation menu.
Click Save.

Drupal Commons displays your new menu entry in the main navigation menu. Notice that it is at the right-most position. To change the order of items in a navigation menu, complete the following steps:

From the admin menu, select Administer > Site building > Menus. The Menus page opens.
Click the Primary links link. The Primary links page opens.
Your new menu item is at the top of the list of menu items for the main navigation menu. To move your menu entry to another location, grab the arrow icon to the left of the menu entry and drag it to the new location in the menu.
Note that you can either make your menu entry a top-level entry for this menu, or you can make it an entry in a drop-down entry for one of the other menu entries.
After you move your menu entry to the correct location, click Save configuration.

Your new page is now available to all of your visitors as a menu option on the main navigation menu in the position that you set.

Extending Drupal Commons' functionality

Modules

Since Drupal Commons is based on the Drupal platform, if there’s functionality that you need that isn’t provided, you can search through and install one of the more than 8,000 additional add-on modules provided by the Drupal community at drupal.org.

To view a list of the modules that are installed on your Drupal Commons server, in the main navigation menu, select Administer > Site building > Modules.

For more information about how to install modules on your Drupal Commons server, see Installing modules and themes at drupal.org.

Managing users and groups

Creating groups

A group is an area where a community of users interested in a topic can create content about that topic, and interact with each other using status messages.

To create a group in which users can interact, complete the following steps:

Log in to the Drupal Commons website using an account that has the community manager role.
From the main navigation menu, select Community > Groups.

The Groups page opens.
Click Create a group.

The Create Group page opens.
Enter the Name and Description for the new group.
In the Group options vertical tab, select the Membership requests option, ranging from Open (group membership requests are immediately accepted) to Closed (group membership requests are exclusively managed by an administrator).
Click Save.

Drupal Commons creates the group with your account as the manager. Other users can join the group by viewing the group on the Group page and clicking Join, or by accepting an invitation using the Invite members link in the group.

Inviting users to a group

As a member of a group on the Drupal Commons website, you can invite other users on the website to also be members of the group you're in.

Note: You can only invite users that already have an account on your website.

To invite a user to a group, complete the following steps:

From the main navigation menu, select Community > Groups.

The Groups page opens.
In the Group menu section, click the Invite members link.
The Invite members to this group page opens.
In the Invitees field, enter a list of usernames that you want to invite to this group.
Notes: You can only send 20 group invitations at a time using this page.

To view a list of user accounts on the website, from the main navigation menu, select Community > Members.
Click Invite.

The users you invite to your group receive an email inviting them to the group.

Following other users

Similar to other social applications, users on a Drupal Commons website can follow other users to better track their updates and activities.

To follow another user, complete the following steps:

Log in to the website.
From the main navigation menu, select Community > Members.

The Browse users page opens.
Browse to the user account that you want to follow, and then click the user account name. The user's account page opens.
Click Follow. A confirmation pop-up window appears.
Click Send.

The user's account page displays a message that you're now a follower for their account.

You can see a list of the users you're following by selecting My stuff > My friends from the main navigation menu, and then clicking the Users you follow tab.

Activity streams

Drupal Commons provides administrators and users more avenues of communication by using activity streams.

By creating status messages in their own (or their friends') profiles' activity streams, users can communicate with other users both publicly and privately, without having to explicitly create formal content.

Along with user-created status messages, Drupal Commons can display a user's activity, including content creation and group membership changes. While Drupal Commons displayed a user's activity in the past (using the Heartbeat trigger), Drupal Commons now allows administrators to create rules that explicitly determine the actions that they want to track.

Administrative tasks

Configuring activity streams

You can track several different kinds of user and group activity to display on the status wall. To do this, from the admin menu, select Administer > Rules > Triggered rules. The Triggered rules page opens.

Use this page to manage the activity streams that Drupal Commons tracks and displays.

User tasks

Viewing activity streams

To view a user's activity (including creating a blog entry, editing a wiki, or joining a group), open their user profile and inspect their status wall. To view a user's profile, from the main navigation menu, select Community > Members, and then click the link for the selected user.

You can see a group's activity stream by opening the group, and viewing the list of recent activities relating to the group.

Creating a status message

Open your profile page. To do this, from the main navigation menu, select My stuff > My profile.

Note that your profile page has a blank text field with a Share button.
Enter a status message. Your friends will see this message on their status wall and on your profile page.
If you want to share a web link, click the link icon.

Enter the URL that you want to share, and then click Attach. If more than one image appears for the link, click on the left/right arrows to select another image. If you don't want to display an image for the link, select the No thumbnail check box.
If you want to share an image, click the image icon. To find an image on your computer, click Browse.
Click Share.

The new status message appears on your profile page.

Sending messages to other users

Open another user's profile page. To do this, select Community > Members from the primary links menu, browse to the user, and then click on their profile.

Note that the profile page has a blank text field with a Share button.

In the status field, enter a message you want to send to the user.
To make this message only visible to you and and the user, select the Private check box.
After you complete your status message, click Share.

The new status message appears on the user's profile page.

Posting messages to a group

Open the group page. To do this, select My stuff > My groups from the primary links menu, and then click the link for a group.

Note that the group page has a blank text field with a Share button.
Enter a status message.
Click Share.

The new status message appears on the group page, as well as the profile page of any user that is a member of this group.

Maintaining your Drupal Commons site

Viewing site analytics

Along with a robust method of content generation and categorization, Drupal Commons allows administrators to closely track how users interact with the website over time.

To view additional reports of site attributes, including reports on the top 'access denied' errors and the top search phrases, site administrators can select Administer > Reports.

As a shortcut, administrators can view the Site analytics report from the admin menu by selecting Community > Site analytics.

Server status

Your Drupal Commons server has many different attributes that you can monitor to ensure that it is running properly. To make it easier to examine these attributes, you can use the Status report to display a list of server components that are experiencing errors, or which require further inspection.

To open the Status report page, from the main navigation menu, select Administer > Reports > Status report.