MASARYK UNIVERSITYFACULTY OF INFORMATICS

Drupal Commons in Practice:Social Business and Social Network

Master's Thesis

Matej Sabo

Brno 2015

Declaration Hereby I declare that this paper is my original authorial work, which I have workedout by my own. All sources, references and literature used or excerpted during elab-oration of this work are properly cited and listed in complete reference to the duesource.

Matej Sabo

Supervisor: Ing. Leonard Walletzký, Ph.D.

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Mr. Walletzký for his trust and willingness. I am thankful alsoto Peter Hoekerd, whose excellent thesis served me as a guide to structure my work.Last but not least, I am grateful to my family and friends for their love and support.

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Abstract

The work concerns with the social business software and social network sites on theexample of the social business distribution of Drupal, Drupal Commons, a web con-tent management framework developed by the open source community. DrupalCommons is compared to other similar solutions from the domain of social businesssoftware. From this comparison the specifics and advantages of Drupal Commonsare derived and its strong points are used to design a social business platform for theexisting communities around self-development and experience events. This socialbusiness and social network site is developed in cooperation with two centers ofsuch communities, based on their real-life requirements and constraints. Finally, thebenefits, contribution and future development of the resulting site are discussed.

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Keywords

Drupal, Drupal Commons, social business, social business software, social networksite, community portal, community

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Table of Contents

1 INTRODUCTION ........................................................................................................11.1 THE CONTEXT .........................................................................................................................................1

1.1.1 The Social Internet .....................................................................................................................11.1.2 The Social and Business Transition ........................................................................................21.1.3 The Two Meanings of “Social” and “Community” ..............................................................31.1.4 Social Business: Cooperation, not Exploitation ....................................................................51.1.5 Drupal Commons Social Business Distribution ...................................................................6

1.2 THE BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION .......................................................................................................71.2.1 The Need for Tools to Support and Manage the Community ............................................71.2.2 The Requirements, Restrictions and Strategy .......................................................................8

1.3 THE THESIS ASSIGNMENT .........................................................................................................................91.4 THE STRUCTURE AND APPROACH ..............................................................................................................9

1.4.1 The Working Approach .............................................................................................................91.5 SUMMARY ..............................................................................................................................................10

2 THE SPECIFICS OF DRUPAL COMMONS IN COMPARISON TO SIMILAR SOLUTIONS .............................................................................................................11

2.1 DRUPAL AND DRUPAL COMMONS ............................................................................................................112.1.1 Drupal .......................................................................................................................................112.1.2 Drupal Versions .......................................................................................................................112.1.3 Drupal Modules .......................................................................................................................112.1.4 Drupal Distributions ...............................................................................................................122.1.5 Drupal Commons ....................................................................................................................12

2.2 THE SIMILAR AND COMPARABLE PRODUCTS ............................................................................................132.2.1 Research on Similar Products ................................................................................................132.2.2 The Evaluation of the Results ................................................................................................132.2.3 Discussion and Conclusion ....................................................................................................13

2.3 THE COMPARISON ..................................................................................................................................142.3.1 Jive .............................................................................................................................................142.3.2 SharePoint/Yammer ................................................................................................................152.3.3 Wordpress: BuddyPress ...........................................................................................................152.3.4 Joomla: JomSocial, and Community Builder ....................................................................162.3.5 The Comparison Criteria ........................................................................................................172.3.6 The Comparison Tables ..........................................................................................................182.3.7 Further Resources ....................................................................................................................19

2.4 CONCLUSION: THE SPECIFICS OF DRUPAL COMMONS ...............................................................................202.4.1 The Zero Cost ............................................................................................................................202.4.2 The Support of the Developer Community .........................................................................202.4.3 The Extensibility ......................................................................................................................202.4.4 The Steeper Learning Curve ..................................................................................................212.4.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................21

2.5 SUMMARY ..............................................................................................................................................22

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3 DRUPAL COMMONS IN PRACTICE ...................................................................233.1 THE REAL-WORLD ASSIGNMENT ............................................................................................................23

3.1.1 The Domain ..............................................................................................................................233.1.2 The Business and Stakeholder Requirements .....................................................................23

3.2 REFINING THE REQUIREMENTS .................................................................................................................253.2.1 The Contributed Modules and Additional DC Features Evaluation ..............................253.2.2 The Minimal Viable Product (MVP) .....................................................................................273.2.3 The Refined Requirements to Base the MVP on .................................................................273.2.4 The Key Use-Cases ...................................................................................................................28

3.3 DESIGNING THE SITE ..............................................................................................................................283.3.1 Designing the Content Types ................................................................................................283.3.2 Designing the Layout and Graphics ....................................................................................30

3.4 THE IMPLEMENTATION ............................................................................................................................313.4.1 The Development Environment .............................................................................................313.4.2 The Modules and their Configuration .................................................................................313.4.3 Theming ....................................................................................................................................323.4.4 The Demonstration of the Implementation ........................................................................33

3.5 THE SUMMARY AND REFLECTION ............................................................................................................35

4 CONCLUSION ...........................................................................................................374.0.1 The Contribution .....................................................................................................................374.0.2 Lessons Learned .......................................................................................................................384.0.3 The Social Benefits ...................................................................................................................384.0.4 Next Steps and Possible Future Directions ..........................................................................38

5 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................40

6 ATTACHMENT ............................................................................................................I6.1 DETAILS ON THE RESEARCH OF SIMILAR PRODUCTS TO DRUPAL COMMONS .................................................I6.2 SNAPSHOT OF THE DEVELOPED WEBSITE ..................................................................................................II

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List of Abbreviations

CMS Content Management System

CRM Customer Relationship Management

DC Drupal Commons

FOSS Free and Open Source Software

GUI Graphical User Interface

IRC Internet Relay Chat

SEO Search Engine Optimization

SNS Social Network Site

WCM Web Content Management

WEM Web Experience Management

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1 Introduction

“Networking is always important when it is real and it is always a useless dis-traction when it is fake.”

– Seth Godin [1]

The introduction opens with our thoughts on the wider social context of social busi-ness1 and social network sites2, coupled with insights from other authors. Later wenarrow our perspective and look at the practical background and nature of the real-world assignment connected with this thesis. Finally, we define our working ap-proach and the structure of this paper.

1.1 The Context

The IT is not an area on its own, and neither is the Drupal3 software a stand-alonetool. Things have meaning and make sense only through the context of relationshipsand connections to other things. The following paragraphs will lead the readerthrough the shifts the social Internet has undergone, and how these changes influ-ence the society, the business enterprises and the social business companies. On thebackground of the present social crisis, the role and possible benefits of social busi-ness networks are discussed.

1.1.1 The Social Internet

The social networks are changing the way we use the Internet. It is not about an au -thority presenting information to audience anymore. The old division between au-thors and consumers loosened with the adoption of Web 2.04 and its user-generatedcontent of comments, forums and blog posts. Virtual communities have emergedbased on these new ways of communication and sharing of information.

The Internet about us, our connections, our lives, our feeling of self-expressionand participation. The online connections exceed beyond exchange of opinions orbeyond areas of work or interest. We opened ourselves, and we present ourselves:what we are doing, how we feel, where we were. It is not just virtual connections;the social Internet become a platform that maps on our actual human network of so-

1 There are two distinct notions of “social” business: One is “the use of social media, social softwareand social networks to enable more efficient, effective and mutually useful connections betweenpeople, information and assets that in turn can drive business decisions, actions and outcomes acrossthe enterprise. The other use of ‘social’ business refer to organizations or to economic systems thatpromote some notion of social welfare.” [2, p. 7]

2 “Social networks are formal descriptions of groups of people who congregate in a social medium.Social media is how people get together virtually to accomplish outcomes.” [2, p. 20]

3 “Drupal is a free open source content management system that allows individuals or a community ofusers to easily publish, manage, and organize a wide variety of content on a website.” [3, p. 15]

4 “Philosophy of Web 2.0 included these ideas: Using the Web as an applications platform,Democratizing the Web, Employing new methods to distribute information.” [4]

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cial relationships and gives us tools to communicate faster and in much broader andgenerous way.

Naturally, there are drawbacks: Some people get lost in the social media. Theymistake the Internet social network for the actual human social network: they mis-take the media (“the map”) for the reality (“the landscape”) itself. This has conse-quences, and relates to the social crisis.

“What the Internet has allowed is an enormous amount of fake networking to takeplace and it is so easy to be seduced by it. (...) What translates is: Are there people outthere who I would go out of my way for and would go out of their way for me? Byearning the privilege up one day of having a connection be worthwhile.” [1]

1.1.2 The Social and Business Transition

The social shift caused by the online social networks is to a great extend influencingalso the commercial world of business. The marketing must have changed dramati-cally, once the people started to discuss the consumer goods in virtual communities:The zero-moment of truth5 emerged. Moreover, the companies realized, that they arenot the authority caring for its customers anymore, and that they might not be thecore node anymore: New centers of social interaction have emerged.

These innovations in consumer social web created both opportunity and risk forthe enterprises. The customers as well as the company employees are gathering, co-operating and sharing their online lives: They are self-organizing themselves, andmaintain their own collaborative networks. [6] The enterprise may still be the centerpoint of the community, but it is not in control anymore. It may have a web presen-tation, a blog, a Facebook fan page or group, and organize real-life social events tonurture the community. However, they are not in charge of their social platform. Itis a crisis and a great challenge at the same time.

“(Enterprise social media platforms) are about communication, coordination, collab-oration and transparency. But they’re also about power — the power of individuals andteams to reach within and across enterprises to effect meaningful change. (...) The riseof social media platforms inside the enterprise and out now means that entire manage-ments now see “emergent” leaders and processes. These aren’t designed for or planned;they materialize directly from the perceived needs of concerned individuals and teamswho now have the ability to self-organize inside the firewall and out because of thesemedia.” [6]

The organizations that succeed and leverage the social momentum increase loy-alty, brand value, and revenue. Those that fail to do so will be stuck merely watchingas their communities self-organize wherever the community wants to – probablyout of sight, out of mind and out of the influence of the organization. [7, p. 1]

5 “ZMOT is that moment when you grab your laptop, mobile phone or some other wired device andstart learning about a product or service (or potential boyfriend) you’re thinking about trying orbuying.” [5]

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Hence, the need for an enterprise arises: to align with its community on the plat-forms of social media. It is not just about Facebook, Twitter or LinkdIn: These are so-cial platforms with their own aims and properties. An enterprise could benefit froma specific social and collaboration platform, where it can harness the potential of itsemployee and customer communities. Thus, the need for own Social Business Plat-form emerged and is nowadays very actual:

“Social business is still just getting started. But its value is clearly emerging for mar-keting, innovation, operations and leadership. (...) Implementing social business initia-tives has been a difficult process for many organizations, however. (...) Whatever thedifficulties organizations have with adopting social business activities, social businessappears to be a trend with staying power.” [2, p. 8]

1.1.3 The Two Meanings of “Social” and “Community”

The business companies have to invest a great deal of energy into forming a cus-tomer or employee community, and the people in these communities are still notvery strongly tied together. However, there are companies with natural communitiesaround them. We will take a closer look at these, and attempt to reason the differ-ence.

In this respect, the orientation on money and profit may play an important role.The act of money exchange tends to loosen the social relationship because the con-cerned sites are afterwards even: Their bond was represented by a financial commit-ment, and when the exchange of ownership is over, they are unbound and free to go.This type of connection is very flexible and attractive for its feeling of individualityand independence. However, as we see it, it tends to degrade the social aspect and tolimit the long-term relationship between a customer and a company to a mere iden-tification with the brand through advertisement [8], to social display6, or tomental/physical addictions that the company's product introduces7. By services andproducts-as-a-service, the bond is tighter, but its character is still more practical andtechnical rather than social. These commercial relationships thus add to the atom-ization of society. They make the for-profit companies unsocial and incompatiblewith the nature of a human community.

6 Social display: A product of a specific character or brand is consciously (conspicuous consump-tion) or subconsciously used as a status symbol to communicate and display the owner's pre-tended social status [9]. As we see it, this commonly happens in the atmosphere of a permanentstate of stress, competition and social thereat, present in many corporations with formalhierarchies of de facto strangers. Products frequently used in this way include cars, watches,clothes, smart-phones, and various services, etc.

7 Addictive products: Not just many consumer products such as cigarettes, refined sugar sweets orwhite pastry are addictive and harmful [10]; according to Vienna university professor HermannKnoflacher, even the acceleration experienced while driving a car confuses our brains and causesa strong mental addiction that in turn prevents many people from perceiving this kind oftransportation critically [11].

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Another possible cause for the companies' struggle in the social area relates thisfeeling of community. The psychological sense of community8 arises spontaneouslyunder certain conditions and naturally bonds people together. The experience is verystrong and it is the base of healthy human relationships9. The psychological sense ofcommunity emerges when there is the feeling of safety and trust: A safe circle offriends where and individual can open herself or himself. The community bonds areformed not when we formally exchange goods for money, but when we unselfishlycooperate and contribute. What we give is not necessarily material: We give and ac-cept support, time and energy, we share our feelings and perspectives. It is an expe-rience that touches our souls and uplifts our spirits. We owe each other somethingand in the thankfulness a social bond is formed. This is the base of natural humancooperation. Such a community simply does not emerge in a shopping center – amuch friendlier environment is a company, where people interact and cooperate to-gether, not with a “hierarchical” motivation of money, power and social status, butrather with a “heterarchical” motivation of a common cause and mutual help.

Thus, in our eyes, a business company's concept of social connections may bevery limited in comparison to natural social connections. However, it is rarely per-ceived so because the true communities tend to be overlooked. The formal model ofa social group (community, company, society) present in our minds and culture, isbased on power and control rather than on compassion and cooperation. This makesit hard for many people see and recognize the true communities, even when they ex-perience them first-handedly: People often lack a corresponding though model toconnect the experience to. It is no wander that the sense of community is often de-scribed as something “miraculous”, “transcendental” or “divine” [14], not apprehen-sible by the mind.

Thus, a double meaning of the words “social”, “society”, “community” or “com-pany” arises, and it is a ground for unconscious misunderstandings. As Seth Godinindicated in the introductory quotation: we tend to mistake the real human socialconnections with their formal representation in the virtual social network. The busi-ness companies mistake the map for the landscape itself, and under the flag of SocialBusiness they struggle to create and foster not actual relationships, but the lines onthe map. They are not interested in humans, but just in customers with money andtheir consumers' attitude towards the brand. It was estimated that over 70 % of thecorporate social business efforts fail [15], and we perceive this as the main couse.

8 “Sense of community is a feeling that members have of belonging, a feeling that members matter toone another and to the group, and a shared faith that members' needs will be met through theircommitment to be together.” [12]

9 “Reciprocity and exchanges also increase trust. (...) Diffuse reciprocity refers to a continuingrelationship of exchange that at any given time may be unrequited, but over time is repaid andbalanced. Again, this contributes to the development of long-term obligations between people, whichcan be an important part of achieving positive environmental outcomes.” [13]

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1.1.4 Social Business: Cooperation, not Exploitation

The devision between for-profit business enterprises and non-profit/charity compa-nies is in reality not clearly set. In our view, it is not black or white, not infrared orultraviolet; there is a whole colorful spectrum emerging: the social business 10. Thereare companies that still strive for profit, but are at the same time aware of their cor-porate responsibility. They are aware of the well-being of the communities whatthey serve, and of the social, economic and environmental sustainability of their liv-ing ecosystem. These “rainbow” enterprises are not based on exploitation11 of humanand natural resources to maximize financial profit, they do not mine the social capi-tal and do not force their employees or contractors into modern-age slavery. They donot lock their customers in through product addiction and advertisement propa-ganda.

The real social business enterprises are social in the full meaning: They createvalue by social cooperation. Their objectives are sustainability, healthy social rela-tionships, both in the inner community of core employees, and in the broader com-munities of fans, partners, collaborators, users and customers as well. They supportand encourage voluntarily collaboration and create a safe space for us to be openand human. This is a place where the spontaneous experience of community occursand the people form not just an online virtual community, but a real community thatmay, however, be supported by a virtual social platform. In this case the businesscompany serves merely a legal and formal interface for the natural community.

One example of such a company may be Acquia. Acquia, Inc. is the software en-terprise connected with Drupal (the free open source CMS framework) and with thecommunity of Drupal developers and users. The Drupal virtual community consistsof more than one million developers, contributors and users [21] that participate onthe Drupal project. These people voluntarily connect and cooperate to make thisweb framework better, and at the same time they share the advantage of such col-laboration. 10 “Social business is a cause-driven business. (...) The company must cover all costs and make profit, at

the same time achieve the social objective, such as, healthcare for the poor, housing for the poor,financial services for the poor, nutrition for malnourished children, providing safe drinking water,introducing renewable energy, etc. in a business way.” [16] We would like to extend this definitionbeyond the notion of us economically “mighty” helping “the poor”. Indeed, we all need help in thesocial sense. Our civilization is in a deep crisis [17], [18] and our very human relationships arefalling apart. The urge to help often comes from our own need to heal ourselves as social beings,and it should not be directed elsewhere and out, even when it is more comfortable to see theothers as miserable and needy.

11 “While many forms of exploitation involve coercion and deception, others do not, such as entering intoprostitution for lack of other economic opportunities to provide care for a child or family member. (...)Victims can also be lured into exploitation by providing misleading information or by misinformingvictims about their rights and privileges in order to keep them in a perpetual position of dependency.”[19] We would like to add, that the best slave is one that is not conscious of his or herenslavement. Such slaves are produced by a school system based on obedience, control andindoctrination, rather than on cooperation, respect and integral development [20].

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For example, when a developer needs a specific functionality for building a web-site, it is very likely that for such a feature there already exists an extension modulecontributed by other developers. He or she can use this module and can decide toshare his or her improvements back to the community. Thus, also the original cre-ator of the module benefits, as well as the whole Drupal user-base. This way, value iscreated by open voluntarily collaboration and not through exploitation of human ornatural resources.

The value created is the virtual and social capital: the Drupal software and thestrengthening of the bonds and relationships of the community. Drupal is one of thebest web development frameworks and it is free of license fees – it is available forthe benefit of everybody. However, this does not mean that there is not a way tomonetize value. One way, that the Acquia company is gaining profit, is by makingDrupal usable and comprehensible for the for-profit enterprises. Thus, we are ap-proaching the point where it all connects.

1.1.5 Drupal Commons Social Business Distribution

Drupal is a CMS web development framework that is capable of building a SocialNetwork and Social Business Platform. There already exists a pre-packed solution:the Drupal Commons Social Business distribution.

“Many organizations, including Nvidia, Symantec, Turner Broadcasting, and manyothers, already use Drupal to power their community sites. Drupal Commons makesthis process easier by packaging together key modules, content types and theme snip-pets into an installation profile that is ready to go out of the box. Because it is Drupal,organizations still have the flexibility to modify Commons to extend its capabilities, toturn features on/off and tap into the wealth of Drupal community resources.” [22]

Acquia's activities include the introduction of business companies to the benefitsof using Drupal Commons as a social business platform. The enterprises, once theyadopt the Drupal Commons, can in turn help the Drupal community and the Acquiacompany by investing in it and by paying for support and custom development.

Drupal Commons, although it is primarily targeted at the enterprise businesscompanies, may be a promising platform for the social business and communitycompanies, as well. The aim of this work is to explore this specific use case.

The thesis is based around a real-world assignment for a low-budget social busi-ness start-up and website, formed in cooperation with two community centers. TheDrupal Commons software has served as a base for the development of the websitewith the aim to support the community interactions, social business activities andpromotion in the socially beneficial domain of self-development events, experientialeducation and voluntary work.

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1.2 The Background and Motivation

The following section explains the background and motivation behind building a so-cial business and social network site, as well as the specifics and practical needs andrequirements behind this venture. The line of thought will complement the chapter“Context” by not approaching Drupal Commons starting from the wide social andbusiness concepts, but from the opposite direction: from the actual needs and painsof two small local community centers, one in Moravský Kras in the Czech Republicand the other in Zaježová in Slovakia. Thus, we will introduce the application ofDrupal Commons in the area of non-profit and emerging social business companies.

1.2.1 The Need for Tools to Support and Manage the Community

The wider community around the ecological and leisure center Švýcárna inMoravský Kras consists of about 400 people interested in self-development, experi-ential education, voluntary and ecological activities. The place of Švýcárna is a smallcomplex of historical buildings in a protected landscape area that provides a baseand support for events, some of which are free and low budget with voluntary work,while other are more professional and commercial.

Many of the community members know each other and randomly meet a coupleof times a year on various events. Based on the type of the events, several very dif-ferent but overlapping sub-communities there exist around Švýcárna. Moreover,there is the inner community of people living at the place, and the lecturers andmentors leading the events. The basic need and challenge is to target the right sub-communities with the right information regarding the promotion of events and helprequests, and to keep them engaged according to their specific interest.

The tools, that the center uses, are a website with events and articles, a Facebookfan page, a Facebook group and a mailing list. The community members sign up forthe events through a form on the website; there is however no connection betweenthe database of event participants, the Facebook fans and the mailing list sub-scribers. Moreover, a common community platform would contribute to thestrengthening of relationships between people that causally meet at the centerthroughout the year. With profiles, Facebook integration and friend connections itwould be easier for the community members to remember each other and to keep intouch.

The community around Brána in Zaježová is more homogeneous, but faces a sim-ilar challenge: to address the right people with the invitations to workshops, semi-nars, ceremonies and meet-ups. They use a Facebook group with a few thousandmembers, but this tends to get clogged with too much of various content. After aninvestigation and interview with a number of event organizers and members of sim-ilar communities from other places, the problem appears to be much wider: Most ofsuch community centers are facing it, and try to cope with it more or less success-fully. Thus, a possibility emerges: to create a social network site that would provide

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community management tools, services and features not just for Švýcárna andBrána, but possibly for many other communities and centers all over the Czech Re-public and Slovakia. Such a wider virtual community could later provide a flow ofincome, either through featured events, premium event management, promotionand newsletter services, or through an integrated e-shop.

1.2.2 The Requirements, Restrictions and Strategy

In the recent years the Social Network sites development has become much easier:The community builder and social network features of various web content manage-ment systems and frameworks make it feasible to create a social network site (SNS)through configuration rather than through resource intensive programming. “As aresult, small organizations can now afford to develop domain-specific SNSs targetingsmall communities with very specific interests and social connections.” [23, p. 3]

This is the case with our endeavor: With almost no budget and limited availabletime, it may still be possible for us to create a domain specific social network site.What is important is the right strategy that would enable us to gain the most of ourposition. We have defined this strategy in the following points:

• Using the advantages of Drupal, namely its zero-cost and the out of the boxsocial network features, together with thousands of contributed Drupal mod-ules, that extend its core functionality, can greatly save our resources.

• The right selection of the feasible features from among the possible require-ments can minimize the programming effort. The priority is developmenttime and usability, not specific features: when, after an inspection, it is clearthat a feature would demand custom coding, we drop this requirement forthe time being. This requires a throughout analysis of the possible require-ments and the specific features that Drupal provides, leading to a refined listof feasible requirements.

• Ideally, the site could be developed with the least amount of effort and al-most no programming. This way our energy could be concentrated on thevirtual community building12, cooperation with partners and communitycenters, social network marketing, quality content, as well as on tuning theuser experience and visual appeal.

The further ideas and advantages of such a development strategy and explainedin the following excerpt:

“Changing requirements on the fly may seem outrageous to some. However, (...) it ismore important to deploy a function quickly to gather community feedback for refine-ment than to carefully plan and implement every detailed requirement that the usersmay or may not want.” [23, p. 5]

12 In this regard we recommend a post by Sangeet Paul Chodary: What is needed to grow a webstart-up's user-base [24]

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1.3 The Thesis Assignment

The official thesis assignment reads:

The aim of the thesis is to describe the specifics of the social business distribution of theCMS framework Drupal, Drupal Commons, in comparison with other similar productsand solutions. Author of the thesis will design, develop and implement a practical ex-ample of usage, i.e. web service in accordance to a real-world assignment of a domain-specific Social Network Site. Author will analyze benefits of this web service andpresent its advantages.

1.4 The Structure and Approach

The thesis assignment consists of multiple interlocking objectives. The working ap-proach is based on the gradual resolution of these objectives.

1.4.1 The Working Approach

Our working approach has been based on the logical structure of the assignment:

1. Describe the specifics of the social business distribution of Drupal Commons(DC) in comparison with other similar products.

1.1 Introduce Drupal and DC.

1.2 Compile a list of similar comparable products and characterize them.

1.3 Assemble a list of relevant criteria to base the comparison on.

1.4 Perform the comparison.

1.5 Derive the specifics and advantages of DC.

2. Create a web service based on this distribution in accordance with a real-world assignment and taking the advantage of particular features dis-cussed in the previous section.

2.1 Form the requirements for the web service.

2.1.1 Analyze the real-world assignment.

2.1.2 Discuss the specific features of DC and Drupal modules beneficialto our real-world assignment.

2.1.3 Prioritize and refine the functional requirements.

2.1.4 Define the MVP.

2.2 Design and implement the web service.

2.2.1 Choose the development environment and tools.

2.2.2 Design the content types.

2.2.3 Design the UI and graphics.

2.2.4 Translate the UI.

2.2.5 Configure the modules.

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2.2.6 Implement and test the use-cases.

3. Conclude and Evaluate the Work.

3.1 Summarize the lessons-learned.

3.2 Analyze the benefits of the web service.

3.3 Discuss the next steps and possible future directions.

The above outline also forms the structure for the chapters of this paper.

1.5 Summary

In the introductory chapter the wider context and background of this work were ex-amined. On the example of the Acquia company, we have noted some concepts ofsocial business in connection with the social business software. Furthermore, wehave presented the aim of this thesis, introduced the domain of our real-world as-signment, and set the approach and structure for the work.

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2 The Specifics of Drupal Commons in Comparison to Similar Solutions

The core of this chapter is the comparison of Drupal to other similar social networkor social business platforms. First, we introduce and characterize Drupal CMS andDrupal Commons distribution (DC). Next, we research the comparable products andservices, and compile a list of relevant comparison criteria. The chapter concludes bythe specific advantages and disadvantages of DC.

2.1 Drupal and Drupal Commons

Before moving to the problematic of various social network and social business plat-forms, we first get familiar with the concepts of Drupal: the modules, themes, anddistributions. Furthermore, we characterize the Drupal Commons Social Businessdistribution.

2.1.1 Drupal

Drupal is a free and open source community developed web framework. Although itis commonly described as content management software (CMS), this is not accurate:“Drupal is not a CMS. It is the framework with which you build your own CMS, to yourspecifications, to suit your needs. It is a Content Management Framework.” [25]

Drupal is fit especially for building large collaborative and content-focused web-sites, and it is well suited for small to mid-sized organizations [26]. The functionaland design features of Drupal include: extensive APIs, advanced analytics, compre-hensive development tools, great flexibility and customization, and the largest devel-oper ecosystem, with over 180,000 developers and over 2,000 active Drupal modules[27]. This makes it a very solid solution with outstanding community support anddocumentation. With 2% of all the websites based on Drupal [28], it is the thirdmostly used CMS, after Joomla and Wordpress.

2.1.2 Drupal Versions

The software versions, which this work deals with, are Drupal 7 and Drupal Com-mons 3. The other major version of Drupal used today is Drupal 6, that Drupal Com-mons 2 is based on. Its end of support date was announced to be three months afterthe new Drupal 8 is released [29]. Drupal 8 is now in its beta phase; this means thatDrupal 6 is near the end of its life, thus we have not concerned with it.

2.1.3 Drupal Modules

The advantage of Drupal is a flexible and complex website development throughconfiguration and add-ons called modules:

“The main strength of this CMS lies in its expandability. It can easily host numerouscomplementary modules (forums, photo galleries, polls, forms, newsletters, messaging,

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chats, surveys, online payments, shared calendars and more). In particular, it has welldesigned, highly appreciated modules developed by the community, that make it par-ticularly well suited for corporate social networks.” [30]

We will not go into explanations how Drupal and Drupal modules are installedand used, nor how it all internally works. There is online documentation available13.

2.1.4 Drupal Distributions

There is a growing number of Drupal distributions that combine the Drupal core andcertain modules, themes, and features: “In many cases, the CMS you need has alreadybeen built. Drupal calls these ‘distributions’, and they are ready-made content manage-ment systems built with Drupal.” [31]

Some distributions are full-featured packaged forms of Drupal aimed at a special-ized use-case, such as academic, non-profit, publishing site, online store, intranet, orsocial network site; while others serve as quick-start tools for developers. Theygreatly ease and speed up the setting up of a website and can provide a good start -ing point for a custom website development. [32]

2.1.5 Drupal Commons

One of the Drupal distributions is Drupal Commons, that comes with a promise of afree social business and social network platform that surpasses many expensive en-terprise solutions. It makes a ready-to-use solution for supporting either internal orexternal virtual communities around an organization. [33]

The social features of DC [34] include:

• Profiles & friending to build a network of relationships

• User and group activity streams

• The tracking of updates to match the user's interests, with email notifications

• Trending relevant content, based on comments, likes, and views, withoutmanual moderation by community managers

• Moderation system with spam reporting

• Community analytics to track engagement and identify active topics

• “Likes” – the recommendations serving to share and discover new content

“Acquia started working on Drupal Commons in response to inquiries from large,multinational companies who were frustrated with the limitations of the proprietarysocial enterprise software choices. They liked the flexibility of Drupal, and were willingto pay for it – but they weren’t comfortable starting with ‘just’ a framework. Theywanted a base on which they could build, something that they could market to theirCEOs as ‘enterprise-ready out of the box’ while still being easily extensible.” [35]

13 Drupal – Community Documentation: https://www.drupal.org/documentation

12

2.2 The Similar and Comparable Products

In this sub-chapter, we describe the process of finding products and services compa-rable to Drupal Commons (DC), and we compare these with DC.

2.2.1 Research on Similar Products

The list of candidates for comparison was generated on basis of an extensive Googlesearch. The details can be found in the attachment: 6.1 D etails on the Research ofSimilar Products to Drupal Commons.

The search terms used were “Drupal Commons” in combination with one of thefollowing: “comparison”, “alternative”, “vs”, “compare”; where the first of them gen-erated the most relevant results. Together, over a hundred search results were evalu-ated. Only the search results with the character of an article or an essay were takenas relevant. The forum posts, questions & answers and other user-generated contentwere filtered out because of their often questionable informative value.

2.2.2 The Evaluation of the Results

The articles were evaluated as follows: Those, that primarily focused at DC and com-pared it to other product or products, were granted two points. Those articles, whereDC was merely listed and characterized among other products of similar use-case,were granted one point. All the other articles were discarded as not relevant.

The following conclusion was drawn: The product, that showed up the most fre-quently, was Jive; scoring 15 points. Sharepoint/Yammer and Wordpress/BuddyPresswere mentioned as well, though in a much lesser extend, with the score of 3 and 4points. Many other platforms were also mentioned, but never in a direct comparisonwith DC, and all of them scored only 1 point: Open Atrium, VoiceBox, IBM Connec-tions, Joomla, Elgg, Dolphin, Liferay, Ning, SocialGO, Spruz, Adobe Experience Man-ager: Social, Telligent (Zimbra), Tibbr: Tibco Social, VMWare Socialcast, and ESNSocial Engine. For the purpose of the following comparison, all these products, ex-cept Joomla, were neglected.

2.2.3 Discussion and Conclusion

There are points that caught our interest. One is the suspiciously great number ofarticles dealing with Jive. It is clear that DC and Jive are direct competitors on thesame segment of the market. Many of these articles were advocating the benefits ofcommunity developed software. They were the product of the free and open sourcecommunity that defended itself against advertisement campaigns of their corporatecompetitors, such as of the Jive Software company and of Microsoft that stands be-hind SharePoint and Yammer. [36], [37]

Another point is the lack of articles directly comparing Drupal Commons toJoomla. This was unexpected, as Joomla is the second most popular CMSs, and it isknown for its social network capabilities. We have decided to inspect Joomla never-theless, though only marginally. Thus, the subjects of our comparison with DC in

13

the following section are: Jive, Sharepoint/Yammer, Wordpress, and marginallyalso Joomla.

The last point worth mentioning is the often inconsistent and unclear categoriza-tion and labeling of the solutions. DC is presented as an integrated social businessand social network software for community driven companies, or as a web experi-ence management system [27]. These wide use-cases include social marketing, socialintranet, social CRM, and communities for innovation [38]. It seems that the linesbetween these product categories are getting blurry:

“The latest generation enterprise social network looks more and more like a modernweb content management system. At the same, web content management solutionssuch as WordPress and Drupal are becoming more social. In time, it will be hard to tellthese categories apart.” [39]

2.3 The Comparison

In the following text we characterize the selected products. We set Drupal Com-mons side by site, first with Jive and SharePoint/Yammer, and next with BuddyPress,and Joomla. The comparison is presented in the form of tables, followed by a discus-sion and conclusions.

2.3.1 Jive

Jive is a social collaboration product developed and marketed by Jive Software com-pany. It is delivered in two main product lines: Jive-n for social intranet, employeeengagement and support; and Jive-x for customer and partner community supportand marketing engagement. [40]

Fig. 1: Screenshot of the Jive-n 30-day trial: the social intranet and employee engagement(Source: own work, the profile picture by Yoshitomo Nara)

14

Jive is a solid, feature-rich, intuitive and user-friendly enterprise level product,but is also extremely expensive. It is one of the very few collaboration tools suitablefor internal workplace collaboration, as well as external partners and customer col-laboration [26]. However, it lacks the ability to make a public facing community por-tal [41].

2.3.2 SharePoint/Yammer

SharePoint is a web application framework and platform developed by Microsoftthat integrates intranet, document management, business intelligence and reporting.It is a project-focused collaboration platform well suited for mid-sized to large orga-nizations [26]. It is not advisable to use SharePoint as a public facing website or tocustomize the graphic design [42].

Yammer is freemium enterprise social networking service that is also owned byMicrosoft. It is used for private communication within organizations, and offersdeep SharePoint integration to add a real-time social layer to core SharePoint capa-bilities [43]. Access to a Yammer network is determined by a user's Internet domain,so only those with allowed email addresses may join their respective networks.

Fig. 2: Screenshot of the standalone Yammer: the domain of mail.muni.cz(Source: own work)

2.3.3 Wordpress: BuddyPress

WordPress is a free and open-source blogging tool and the most popular CMS [28].

“WordPress is no longer restricted to being a plain blogging platform, rather it hasbeen loaded with easy-to-install plugins that can allow you to convert your traditionalWP website into a feature-rich social media network.” [44]

15

BuddyPress is the main software package and a plug-in to transform WordPressinto a social network platform, with member profiles, activity streams, user groups,messaging, and many more possibilities. [45]

Fig. 3: Screenshot of Buddypress with additional plug-ins(Source: own work)

2.3.4 Joomla: JomSocial, and Community Builder

Joomla is a free and open-source web CMS serving primarily as a community and e-commerce platform, with strong social networking features [46].

Fig. 4: Screenshot of the Joomla! Community Builder demonstration(Source: own work)

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Fig. 5: Screenshot of the JomSocial demonstration(Source: own work)

The two most used social network extensions for Joomla are JomSocial and Community Builder:

• Community Builder (CB) is an older extension that is free, but with limited out-of the box functionality and not-so-professional user-experience. It is more flexible and extensible than JomSocial. [47]

• JomSocial is a robust and feature-rich commercial extension, and it is considered the best SNS extension for Joomla. Its pricing starts at $99. [48]

2.3.5 The Comparison Criteria

“Blogs, wikis, profiles and friends are all commodity capabilities (...) available in everyplatform. Therefore, enterprises need to look beyond the feature set and evaluate thelong-term value of the solution.” [49]

We have based the evaluation not so much on product features, but rather onother criteria chosen in accord to the requirements and background of our assign-ment:

• Use-cases – the primary use-cases of the product

• Cost – the estimated starting cost

• Extensibility – the ability to extend the core functionality with availableadd-ons

• Development – the amount of programmer effort and expertise needed

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• Usability – the ease of use for users, administrators and webmasters

• Localization – the support of minor languages such as Slovak and Czech

2.3.6 The Comparison Tables

Jive SharePoint/Yammer Drupal Commons

Use

-cas

es Social intranet, employee en-gagement, collaboration, so-cial CRM [26]

Social intranet, document management, collaboration [43]

CMS, social marketing, social intranet, social CRM, virtual communities [38]

Cos

t

Starting at $12 per user/month[50]

Sharepoint Online + Yammer Enterprise: $5 per user/month [43]

Free and open source

Acquia managed Drupal ser-vices: $99 - $25,000 / month [50]

Ext

ensi

bil

ity Highly extensible via its plug-

in architecture [26]Free and paid apps from the appstore [41]

More than 2,000 active mod-ules allow fast and reliable out-of-the-box development [26]

Dev

elop

men

t One-size-fits-all, very limited customization [51]

“SharePoint is a closed system; building in desired features andfunctions requires a work-around in almost every case” [42]

A community over 180,000 de-velopers, Extensive API [27], Steeper learning curve [26]

Usa

bil

ity Feature-rich, intuitive and

user-friendly [41]A good choice for employee social collaboration [52], steeplearning curve for administra-tors [41]

Extremely user-friendly frame-work [26], flexibility, ease of use [27]

Loc

aliz

atio

n No Slovak or Czech out-of-the-box support [53]

Czech is supported as well as other 27 languages. [54]

Drupal is multilingual, Slovak and Czech localization avail-able, together with translationtools. Partial Slovak and Czechlocalization of DC.

Table 1: The comparison of Jive and SharePoint/Yammer with Drupal Commons

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WordPress/BuddyPress Joomla Drupal Commons

Use

-cas

es Blogging tool, CMS, social network platform, social in-tranet, niche social network [45]

Social networking sites, e-commerce, portal [55]

CMS, social marketing, social intranet, social CRM, virtual communities [38]

Cos

t

Free and open source, free andpayed plug-ins and themes available [56]

Free and open source [57]. Thefree extensions are often lim-ited versions of their commer-cial counterparts. [58]

Free and open source

Acquia managed Drupal ser-vices: $99 - $25,000 / month [50]

Ext

ensi

bil

ity

Plugins and themes, the total of over 37,000 WordPress plug-ins [56], and additionally 610 BuddyPress plugins available [45]

Over 9000 extensions avail-able. [59]

More than 2,000 active mod-ules allow fast and reliable out-of-the-box development [26]

Dev

elop

men

t Largely developed by the hugecommunity. Back-end changestend to be difficult. [60]

Possible to customize the functionalities or add custom features, requires expertise. [61]

A community over 180,000 de-velopers, Extensive API [27], Steeper learning curve [26]

Usa

bil

ity

Very user-friendly, usable evenwithout technical experience. [62]

“A middle ground between the developer-oriented, extensive capabilities of Drupal and user-friendly but complex options ofWP” [46]

Extremely user-friendly frame-work [26], flexibility, ease of use [27]

Loc

aliz

atio

n Wordpress and BuddyPress is multilingual, with Slovak and Czech localization available [56]

Multilingual, offering more than 64 languages. Limited Czech and no Slovak transla-tions of the CB and Jomsocial extensions.

Drupal is multilingual, Slovak and Czech localization avail-able, together with translationtools. Partial Slovak and Czechlocalization of DC.

Table 2: The comparison of Joomla and BuddyPress with Drupal Commons

2.3.7 Further Resources

A detailed overall examination and comparison of the available social business, andsocial networking software was beyond our possibilities. There exist, however, greatresources to be purchased or found on the Internet:

• Choosing the Right Collaboration Platform for Your Organization. [26]• 2014 Social Community Management Comparison. [50]• Enterprise Social Network (ESN) Vendor Comparison [52]• The Forrester Wave™: Community Platforms [63], [64]

For a more detailed comparison of Drupal, WordPress and Joomla, we recommendthe following online resources:

• Drupal vs. WordPress [65]• WordPress vs Joomla vs Drupal + CMS “comparison chart” [60]

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• CMS Comparison: Drupal, Joomla, and WordPress [46]

2.4 Conclusion: The Specifics of Drupal Commons

From the comparison, it is clear that the proprietary Jive and Yammer are an alto-gether different category of software than WordPress and Joomla. Drupal Commonsis in its nature much more similar to these latter, even though it is being developedand marketed as a solution for the enterprise social business.

2.4.1 The Zero Cost

DC is free and open source, with no monthly license fees, so a self hosted DC site isfree. The other social business platforms tend to be rather expensive and thus not fitfor the non-profit sector, nor for a social business in the “human” sense described inthe introductory chapter.

BuddyPress shares this FOSS advantage of DC, while Joomla, although it is alsofree and open source software at its core, is a bit different: its quality extensions areusually commercial, ranging roughly from $20-$100.

Acquia, the company behind Drupal, provides enterprise-level cloud hosting andsupport: “Acquia provides the best integration options of all the vendors we evaluated.Customers touted Acquia Drupal Commons for its flexibility, ease of use, and high re-turn on investment.” [63]

2.4.2 The Support of the Developer Community

Being open source, the developers and site owners have a full control over the codeof their DC site. The open source developer community provides free support: With180,000 developers of Drupal, it is likely that your problem was already solved byothers and there is an issue report or blog post about it. This holds to some extentalso for the other open-source solutions.

However, it is not the case with the other enterprise SBS products with the com-mercial closed-source development model. Although they usually provide an APIand a set of free and payed add-ons to extend the functionality, a more advancedcustomization is impossible or very resource-consuming.

2.4.3 The Extensibility

DC is a Drupal distribution and thus, the thousands of active modules, themes andfeatures are available to extend a DC site [26]. This makes it possible to later addand fully integrate features and functionalities to the site, that are normally notpresent in the SBS concept, such as e-commerce, multi-user blogging CMS, public-facing web presentation, customized event-management or geographical maps dis-play. With the other SBS products, one is greatly limited by the original use-cases ofthe platform. However, it is possible to extend the SBS functionality of these othercommercial platforms by integration with other commonly used enterprise leveltools, mostly for CRM, Document management, or social collaboration.

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“Drupal Commons integrates easily with existing enterprise technologies, includingdigital marketing applications, CRM, document management, support systems, andmore.” [66]

Drupal's extensibility could be matched by Wordpress, and its great many Buddy-Press-compatible plug-ins.

2.4.4 The Steeper Learning Curve

The other SBS platforms are designed to be used and administered by corporate cus-tomers, thus there is a tendency to limit the customization and the complexity ofGUI for the sake of understandability, even for the non-IT users and managers.These are usable out-of-the-box, as well as DC is, but DC gives its administrators amuch greater power of customization through the GUI, although this comes withthe cost of a much steeper learning curve.

In comparison to the two open source CMS with social capabilities, WordPressand Joomla, the Drupal learning curve is also steeper. This is so because Drupal isnot a CMS; it is a more powerful tool, a CMS framework.

As for Buddypress, while DC is out of the box a ready-made product, BuddyPress,as freshly installed, is just a plain core that can be extended. From the administra-tor's point of view, BuddyPress is more user-friendly, and the integration of variousadditional features together is more straightforward than by DC. Drupal develop-ment is also more resource-consuming than that of Wordpress: “In General, it takes 2to 3 times as long to develop a Drupal site as compared to WordPress.” [65]

2.4.5 Conclusion

WordPress with its BuddyPress extension seems like a feasible and promising alter-native to Drupal Commons. Both DC and BuddyPress are open source, with a widecommunity of developers and users and a great many available extensions. Word-Press is the leading solution on the blogging and small website market. On the otherhand, Drupal is the CMS of choice for Enterprise level websites and web applica-tions, with its advanced security and site scale. [65]

That, what distinguishes DC from BuddyPress and Joomla, is the aim: “DrupalCommons is not designed to be a social network – it is designed to be social enterprise.Here’s the distinction: social enterprise sites are designed to be administered by a privi-leged group representing a company – a group that moderates posts and answers ques-tions on a website devoted to discussing a brand or products.” [35]

This differentiation between the inner core and a wider external community suitsour real-world assignment: The communities, that our SBS would support, are com-posed of the inner circles of organizers, leaders and employees, and of the moreloose wider communities of friends and event attendants.

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2.5 Summary

This chapter has begun with the introduction of the Drupal content managementframework and system. The essentials of the Drupal website development werenoted and the concepts and specifics of the Drupal platform explained.

On the basis of research in the area of social business software, we have carriedout a comparison of DC with several competing products and formulated the spe-cific advantaged and disadvantages of DC. These are used as an input for require-ments analysis in the following chapter. The assumption that DC is a suitableplatform for our use-case was confirmed, although BuddyPress could prove to be agood choice for our purpose as well.

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3 Drupal Commons in Practice

This chapter consists of the practical work on a real-world assignment of a socialbusiness site and social network site. Starting with requirements analysis, we gothrough the design and implementation of the site, and evaluation of using DrupalCommons as the base.

3.1 The Real-World Assignment

The work was done in cooperation with the non-profit company and communitycenter EVC Švýcárna, and with the community of Brána. These two centers werecharacterized in the section 1.2. The Background and Motivation, together with thecontext of needs that the social network and social business site should target.

In the following sections, we will deal with the requirements for the design andimplementation of the social-business site in relation to DC.

3.1.1 The Domain

We have studied how the social business distribution of Drupal Commons performsin the context of the social business. However, it is not the commercial corporations,that we primarily focus on, but rather the community centers. These are from theground up concerned with social benefits, such as self-development, educational,spiritual and environmental activities. There is an important commercial and busi-ness aspect behind these activities as well: It provides for the economic sustainabil-ity of the centers – but it is not the objective. So, the subject of our case-study is theuse of Drupal Commons in the domain of small social business and community com-panies.

3.1.2 The Business and Stakeholder Requirements

The requirements, needs and restrictions were gathered through interviews with therepresentatives of EVS Švýcárna and Brána, and with several other people that areactive in the area of community centers and event organizing. The interviews wereaccomplished as part of my internship project by EVS Švýcárna in autumn and win-ter 2014/2015.

In the section 1.2.1. The Need for Tools to Support and Manage the Communitythe higher-level requirements are described: the pains, needs and business objec-tives. The following outline presents the mid-level view of the requirements fromthe perspective of the users of the site, classified by importance:

• Priority A – a “must have” requirement

• Priority B – a “should have” requirement

• Priority C – a “nice to have” requirement

23

The requirements, that DC meets out of the box through configuration and withoutthe need of additional modules or custom coding, are double underlined. The re-quirement, that can be met by additional contributed modules and without extensivecustom coding, are marked by single underline:

1 Overview of the community centers, leaders and events

1.1 A list of centers, leaders and events with filtering – A

1.2 A map of centers and events – C

1.3 A calendar of events – B

1.4 Taxonomy of centers and groups – B

1.5 Keyword search – B

2 Community platform

2.1 Interactions of event attendants (profiles, friending, messaging) – B

2.2 Virtual community spaces (groups) around centers and leaders – C

2.3 Encouraging friend-to-friend event invitations – C

2.4 Integration with existing social networks – A

3 Event management

3.1 Event sign-up for hosted events – B

3.2 Information about external events with links – A

3.3 Attendee management – B

4 Business

4.1 Payed events registrations – B

4.2 E-commerce – B

4.3 Scalability, possibility to expand and provide services to many othercenters () – A

5 Marketing

5.1 Email marketing tools (email newsletter) – A

5.2 Portal with blogs and original articles – A

6 Localization14

6.1 Czech – A

6.2 Slovak – A

6.3 English – C

14 Drupal is fully multilingual with Slovak and Czech language support provided by the community,and with the modules available to customize and extend the translations. Information aboutavailable localizations can be found at https://localize.drupal.org.

24

7 Low budget15

7.1 Minimal initial software cost – A

7.2 Minimal programming effort – A

3.2 Refining the Requirements

In this section, we modify the list of requirements with the intent to get the mostout of DC, and to meet the feasibility limitations: the minimal financial and humanresources, namely the minimal possible programming effort with the maximum ef-fect. The refined list of requirements presents the base for the minimal viable prod-uct (MVP), in other words, the first public version of the site.

3.2.1 The Contributed Modules and Additional DC Features Evaluation

In the following tables, we look at the possibilities that the DC distribution and theDrupal platform offers in relation to the requirements. All the listed module or fea-tures were examined and evaluated, and the chosen solutions are set in bold.

Use-case/functionality Module / DC Feature Evaluation in relation to our use-case

2.5 Integration with existing social networks

Drupal for Facebook An overkill

FB Oauth Less popular

Simple FB connect Suits well

Commons Social Sharing Suits well

4.3 Scalability – Drupal scales well [Schaffer]

5.1 Email marketing tools (email newsletter)

Newsletter A use-case different to ours

Simplenews Needs further customization

5.2 Portal with blogs and origi-nal articles

Views Powerful module, suits well

6 Localization Internationalization, Local-ization, Translation

Suit well

Table 3: The requirements of priority A, and corresponding modules and features

15 In the section 2.4. The Specifics of Drupal Commons, we have defied and explained the strongpoints of DC, namely its zero cost, the free and extensive support of the wide developercommunity, and it unmatched extensibility through over two thousand active contributedmodules.

25

Use-case/functionality Module / DC Feature Evaluation in relation to our use-case

1.3 A calendar of events View, Calendar Suits well

3.1 Event sign-up for hosted events

Entity Registration Needs some custom coding

Commons Events Pages Needs some custom coding

Ticket Needs some custom coding

4.1 Payed events registrations Registration Commerce Needs some custom coding

Commerce Registration Use-case different to ours

4.2 E-commerce Commerce Needs a more throughout inves-tigationUbercart

Table 4: Requirements of Priority B, and corresponding modules and features

Use-case/functionality Module Evaluation in relation to our use-case

1.2 A map of centers and events

Get Locations Needs a more throughout inves-tigation

OpenLayers

Leaflet

2.3 Encouraging friend-to-friend event invitations

– Needs extensive custom coding

Table 5: Requirements of Priority C, and corresponding modules and features

Use-case/functionality Feature Evaluation in relation to our use-case

Listing of site-wide and user-specific site activity.

Commons Activity Streams Important feature

Allowing privileged users to moderate content and users

Commons Content Modera-tion

Good to have

Allowing community managers to promote certain content

Commons Featured Content Good to have

Allowing users to follow con-tent or groups and get notified

Commons Follow Important feature

Identifying and promoting the active content

Commons Radioactivity Important feature

Rich text editor for content cre-ation

Commons WYSIWYG Important feature

Content type for creating blog, article or status updates

Commons Posts Important feature

Responsive theme Commons Origins Good to have

Table 6: DC features relevant to our case, but not present in the original user requirements

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3.2.2 The Minimal Viable Product (MVP)

A minimum viable product is:

• “That version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximumamount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”

• “The smallest thing, you can build, that delivers customer value (and as a bonuscaptures some of that value back).” [67]

In our case, it is the fist production version of the website, that would providevalue to people and thus gather a user base. Only with the live users and their feed -back, we can test our assumptions about the requirements, and design and build thefit features and functionality for the social business site. The features, that wouldpresent a risk, will be postponed; either because their development would be re-source consuming, or because their precise form, workflow or functionality is notclear yet.

3.2.3 The Refined Requirements to Base the MVP on

We have included the most relevant out-of-the-box features of DC, together withthose contributed modules, that provide requested functionality through configura-tion and with minimal custom coding. The out-of-the-box features of DC are doubleunderlined, and the features, that are provided by contributed modules, are markedby a single underline:

1 Overview of the community centers, leaders and events

1.1 A list of centers, leaders and events with filtering

1.2 Taxonomy of centers and groups

1.3 Keyword search

2 Community platform

2.1 Interactions of event attendants (profiles, friending, messaging)

2.2 Virtual community spaces (groups) around centers and leaders

2.3 Integration with existing social networks

3 Event management

3.1 Event sign-up for hosted events

3.2 Information about external events with links

3.3 Attendee management

4 Business

4.1 Scalability, possibility to expand and provide services to many othercenters ()

5 Marketing

5.1 Portal with blogs and original articles

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6 Localization

6.1 Czech

6.2 Slovak

7 The newly-added requirements 7.1 Listing of site-wide and user-specific site activity

7.2 Allowing users to follow content or groups and get notified

7.3 Identifying an promoting the active content

7.4 Rich text editor for content creation

7.5 Content type for creating blog, article or status updates

3.2.4 The Key Use-Cases

As the most important use-cases for the MVP, these were chosen:

• User registers an account.

• User views the site activity stream.

• User views the list of centers and leaders (in the form of groups).

• User views the list of upcoming events.

• User creates a new event information.

• User signs up for an event.

• User creates a new group.

• User posts a message into a group.

• User follows a group.

• User befriends other user.

We will not go into more detail. The precise use-cases and user activity patternsare, for the most part, determined by decisions of the developers behind DC and thecontributed modules. For the purpose of the MVP, we have not gone into modifyingor describing the use-case and work-flow patterns; however, they are apparent fromthe final website.

3.3 Designing the Site

While designing the site, we have taken the advantage of the design and layout thatDC originally comes with. There is little point in trying to reinvent the wheel, nor isit feasible for us at this point to test custom design patterns and to integrate themwith DC. For the purpose of the MVP, we have used the original design of DC withminor customizations.

3.3.1 Designing the Content Types

There is a number of content types in DC and many entity types related to thesecontent types. The content types can be customized through the Drupal administra-

28

tion interface, while the entity types are managed by modules and their configura-tion.

We did not experience a need to graph a data model, rather, we have used thecontent type administration GUI of Drupal to test our design ideas and customiza-tion straight-away in integration with DC. This way the design and implementationphases of the work got interlaced, and, to some extent, merged together.

Fig. 6: The administration interface for content type creation and editing in Drupal(Source: own work)

In this section, we mention only the content types most relevant to our specific use-cases:

• Registered user – the website user with account and profile information

• Circle (group) – a community around a center or leader

• Event – an event listed by a user, optionally related to a circle

• Article – a blog article created by a user

• Post – a post on a community wall created by a user

DC provides a content type “group”, that serves as a community wall, whereusers can join in and interact with each other, in a manner similar to a Facebookgroup. We have decided to use this content type to represent both a community cen-ter itself, and a community around a leader and topic.

We have extended the original fields of the Group and Event content types by ad-ditional fields:

29

• Links – a custom field to provide external links (to community website orFacebook page)

• Category – a custom field to categorize the communities based on their in-terest

• Place – a custom field for a geographical location

Additionally, many minor changes were made. Most of them were concernedwith the front-end display of the content types, their naming, position, display,translation and description.

3.3.2 Designing the Layout and Graphics

The main graphic elements of the site are the following: a horizontal menu withicons; a search box together with a link to user profile, settings and messages; and amain content panel with a sidebar of contextual information.

We have organized the main content into four panels:

• The home panel with site or user activity stream

• The panel of centers and leaders overview, in the form of a list of groups

• The panel of the overview of upcoming events

• The panel of the recent articles

Fig. 7: The discarded design ideas(Source: own work)

After experimenting with own graphical design of the user-interface, we havechosen the simpler default style. This way, the website in itself feels just as a framefor the user-generated community content, so the latter can stand out. Many of thesocial network sites use this pattern, including Facebook, Diaspora or Jive; they useonly a simple typographic logotype and one main color.

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3.4 The Implementation

In this section, we will go through the building of the social-business site using Dru-pal Commons as the starting point. The installation of Drupal Commons, as well asthe basic set-up of the site, is well explained in the official DC documentation on theAcquia website16, so we will focus mainly on the implementation problems that wehave faced. Altogether around a 150 man/hours were invested into the site imple-mentation.

3.4.1 The Development Environment

The natural decision for the development environment is Acquia Cloud17 that comeswith a free developer subscription option:

“Acquia Cloud is a Drupal-tuned application lifecycle management suite with acomplete infrastructure to support Drupal deployment workflow processes from devel-opment and staging through to production. Acquia Cloud includes powerful developerUIs, secure server access using SSH, and automated deployment from a version-con-trolled code repository.” [68]

The production hosting at Acquia starts at $137.00 USD a month. At this point wecannot effort this, so we have used for our production site an ordinary webhostingwithout a development workflow infrastructure and specialized DC support.

For the purpose of this thesis there is a staging version of our site is presented at:http://zemebranalva58lpesi.devcloud.acquia-sites.com

Fig. 8: The workflow interface of Acquia Cloud(Source: own work)

3.4.2 The Modules and their Configuration

The total of nine contributed modules were used to extend the functionality of DC inaccordance of MVP requirements (or to enhance the web administration). Around 30

16 Acquia Documentation: https://docs.acquia.com/commons (available after user registration)17 Acquia Cloud – Premiere Drupal Hosting: https://www.acquia.com/free

31

other additional modules were tested from the perspective of their functionality andintegration. Some of these modules were discarded as not fitting our use-case, whileothers are candidates for later, but will require some custom coding. Moreover, theDC installation profile includes other 33 original DC modules and additional 90 con-tributed modules. We have got familiar with most them and configured them to-wards our needs.

The additional modules18 used for the MVP are the following:

• SMPT – a framework to connect to an external email service, as AcquiaCloud does not provide emailing platform. We have used the service of Send-Grid19 that allows for 400 free emails a day.

• I10n Client – a tool for easy community supported translation of the user in-terface.

• Transliteration – a module that transliterates the characters with diacriticalmarks present in the Slovak and Czech language, so that they do not appearin the URL strings of the user-generated content.

• Expanding Formatter – a display formatter for a text field that uses Java-Script to hide and expand a portion of a long text, used in the descriptions ofcommunities and events.

• Field Permissions – an extension to set certain user permissions on the levelof fields, so that to hide these fields from ordinary users.

• Admin Menu – an improvement to the administration GUI.

• Features Override – to allow for the import and export of changes made tothe DC Features configuration stored in the database.

• SEO Checklist – a tool to help with the website SEO configuration.

• Google Analytics – an integration with the Google Analysis service to gatherfeedback on the user behavior.

3.4.3 Theming

We have used the default Commons Origins theme with a customized color palette,and some custom icons. Some minor modifications were done to the CSS of thetheme.

18 All Drupal contributed modules are available at: https://www.drupal.org/download 19 SendGrid – Email Delivery & Transactional Email Service: https://sendgrid.com

32

Fig. 9: The customized Commons Origins theme: the front page of a registered user(Source: own work)

3.4.4 The Demonstration of the Implementation

Rather than describing the main use-cases and their implementations, we willpresent it in the form of screen-shots. The language of the text in the screen-shots isSlovak, as this is the primary language of the site.

Fig. 10: The front page for the anonymous user.(Source: own work)

33

Fig. 11: The second pane with the overview of groups (communities). The red button lets theuser to create a new group. The side panel contains an activity stream.

(Source: own work)

Fig. 12: The third pane with the overview of upcoming events. The upper red button lets theuser to create a new group, the other button serves for event sign-up.

(Source: own work)

34

Fig. 13: The user interface for sending messages between the users of the site.(Source: own work)

Fig. 14: The user interface for creating a new group (community). In the front is an excerptfrom lower down the page: the custom fields that we have added to the group content type.

(Source: own work)

3.5 The Summary and Reflection

In this chapter, we have presented the requirements analysis, the design and the im-plementation of the social business community site. We have inspected and tested anumber of Drupal modules that would provide the requested functionality, such aspayed event registration or newsletter management. We have experienced that theintegration of contributed modules, such as Ticket, Registration, Commerce or Sim-

35

plenews with the Drupal Commons distribution is a non-trivial task that requiressome amount of custom coding for the result to be user-friendly and usable as weintended.

While designing the MVP of the site, we have sticked to the default features ofDC and maximized the advantages that these propose. We have localized the inter-face of DC into the Slovak language using the Localization Client. This module auto-matically uploads the localized strings to the translation server, so that they areavailable for the whole Drupal community. Furthermore, we have created a newcontent type for blog articles of users, and integrated it with Drupal Commons.

The website is online, the staging version is available at:

http://zemebranalva58lpesi.devcloud.acquia-sites.com

(username: demo@demo.cz, password: demo)

The production version can be accessed on the domain:

http://www.zemebrana.cz

36

4 Conclusion

The objective of this work was to characterize the social business platform DrupalCommons in the context of social business and social networks, to explore its spe-cific features in comparison to other similar products, and while taking the advan-tage of these features, to build a social business site in alignment with the real-worldrequirements of two community centers.

We have carried out research to find out what the similar comparable products inrelation to Drupal Commons are. They turned out to be the enterprise social busi-ness platforms of Jive and Yammer, and the blogging CMS WordPress with theBudyPress add-on. We have examined these and concluded, that DC is indeed veryspecific: it is free and open source, with a wide community support; it is a complexand flexible framework with great customization and extension possibilities.

After analysis of our real-world assignment and the relevant features and charac-teristics of DC, we have formed the refined requirements to base the design and de-velopment of the site on. We had to relax our expectations. The customization of DCby integration with more complex contributed modules has proved to be a time-con-suming task. We managed to build the website, but it is questionable, what value itrepresents for the stakeholders, because it turned out to be unfeasible to implementmany of the expected features under the given conditions.

4.0.1 The Contribution

This work's contribution could be summarized in the following three points:

• We have investigated the possible benefits of using Drupal Commons in thearea of community social business, rather than the enterprise social business,which is DC primarily aimed at.

• Although the website, that we implemented, is not yet alive with a commu-nity, it is a solid base to build upon, with the perspective a providing servicesto a number communities and community centers, not just EVC Švýcárnaand Brána.

• We have taken advance on the concept of social business from an interdisci-plinary perspective. The various notions of social business were discussed onthe examples of Drupal Commons, the Drupal community, the Acquia com-pany, and our two partner community centers focused on social, self-devel-opment and environmental activities.

Our conclusion is, that DC could be a good choice even for non-profit and smallsocial business companies with communities, but it requires a considerable invest-ment, and some level of technical and social networking experience.

37

4.0.2 Lessons Learned

We have learned, that our vision to easily and quickly build a social business and so-cial network website, according to the needs and requirements of our partners fromnon-profit sector, did not withstand the reality.

It appeared that, although Drupal Commons can greatly shorten the developmentof a site, it is, nevertheless, a very complex task. The over one hundred Drupal mod-ules, that we have examined or used while customizing DC, proves this. It hasshowed that, while the modules usually work great, to fit them to our precise used-case and integrate them with DC comes with a steep learning curve and some cus-tom coding.

The Drupal Commons social business distribution thus indeed fits primarily forthe enterprise social business sector, as our research on the comparable productssuggested.

4.0.3 The Social Benefits

By social networking, the people and the relationships are the priority, and muchenergy is involved to support and engage the communities. It is important to bal-ance out the resources, so that not too much effort goes into the software develop-ment and customization, because this can happen on the expense of the human andsocial aspects, that in the fist place need to be fostered.

To be sincere, the social benefits of our site, as of the time being, are little. Thevalue of our site depends mainly on the size of the active user-base. With little ac-tive users, there is not enough content for the site to be attracting, nor have we yetimplemented the originally intended services, that would present value indepen-dently of the user-base, such as event attendant and mailing list management for thecommunity centers. This has proved as not feasible under the requirements of ourreal-world assignment. It was not possible to implement the expected capabilitiesunder the restrictions of the minimal human and financial resources. Even thoughthe website is built and ready to use, as of the time of writing, we have so far missedon the community engagement.

We have realized, that it is the building of the user-base and marketing strategy,that we need to concentrate upon, and to re-evaluate our objectives and visions to-gether with the key stakeholders.

4.0.4 Next Steps and Possible Future Directions

Once we have an actual user base, we can move in the direction of the feature re-quests from our community. In the meantime, we should not put too much effortinto development of features, but rather to the strategy of building a user commu-nity. The key points in this regard include:

38

• Building a community of early adopters (and stakeholders or shareholders)that take the product as their own and invest into it, with the perspective offilling later their specific needs.

• Providing a product that enables its users to self-express themselves: to create something that they would like to share (an event, a blog article, a community circle). This way they would contribute to the propagation of oursite.

• Targeting a niche, a micro-universe. The active community forms easier,when starting from single points of adoption, from groups of early sophisti-cated users. The candidates for our micro-universes are the communitiesaround EVC Švýcárna, Brána, and possibly others.

• Cooperation with the key leaders, connectors and networkers, and contact-ing the event organizers and community centers. Those can easily attractother people from around them.

• Providing a product that is valuable, even without an active community. Thisis tricky in our case. A few ideas include: the implementation of email mar-keting tools to manage a community, the services for event managementmade in accordance with the special needs of our domain, or, possibly, acrowd-sourcing platform for event marketing and discounts. These all wouldrequire additional research and resources.

• Filling the website with content before the actual user-generated content ap-pears, so that the platform does not look like a ghost town to the early users.This would mean an investment of time and resources to fill our site withlinks to the events, that are now spread over a number of websites, portalsand networks.

• Being present on Facebook, but not as a concurrent, but in a contextual andcomplementary manner: to share events on Facebook that link to our site.

Only after we have a working site alive with a community, we can turn to in-vestors, and broaden our team. This would also be the time to focus on the develop-ment of features to provide a financial income flow, such as the email marketingservices for event organizers, or payed events and e-commerce. Sooner than that, wejust do not have enough social energy and information.

It would also be interesting to examine the performance and advantages of usingBuddyPress to build a social business site under the similar conditions.

39

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6 Attachment

All Attachments are stored in the Archive of Thesis/Dissertation of the InformationSystem of Masaryk University.

6.1 Details on the Research of Similar Products to Drupal Commons

Secondary sources comparing Drupal Commons to other products (a simplified tableof results):

I

Based on a Google search on the combinations of terms: „Drupal Commons“ comparison, alternative, vs, compare

Not relevant or redundant search results were filtered out, only the results that scored more than one point are included.

The Google search was done on 2015/4/28, and we evaluated the total of 100 original results.

Legend:

Results of Internet articles where Drupal Commons was the focus and was compared to other product(s) were granted 2 points:

2

Results of Internet articles where Drupal Commons was merely present in the comparison among other products with the focus

being elsewhere were granted 1 point:

1

Results of user-generated content such as comments and forum posts and questions were set as not relevant because of their

questionable value, as well as all other search results, that did not deal with our subject of interest:

Articles from the Social Business Software perspective:

Sources URL Points scored: Jive Points scored: Sharepoint Points scored: Wordpress

mediacurrent.com (1)

mediacurrent.com (2) 2

bluecoda.com 2

socialsoftwarematrix.org 1

buytaert.net 2

cmswire.com 2

r2integrated.com 1 1

mediacurrent.com (3) 2

bluecoda.com 2

liventerprise.com 1

Articles from the Social Network Platform perspective:

Sources URL Points scored: Jive Points scored: Sharepoint Points scored: Wordpress

drupal.org

davidbressler.com 1

premium.wpmudev.org 2

designwall.com

acquia.com 2

cmscritic.com 1

Points total: 15 3 4

Conclusion:

Many other platforms and products were mentioned as well, but never in direct comparison with the Drupal Commons in focus.

These were not included in this table and all of them scored only 1 point. They are the following:

Yammer, Open Atrium, VoiceBox, IBM Connections, Joomla / JomSocial, Elgg, Dolphin, Liferay Ning, SocialGO, Spruz,

Adobe Experience Manager: Social, Telligent (Zimbra), Tibbr: Tibco Social, VMWare Socialcast, ESNSocialEngine.

http://www.mediacurrent.com/blog/comparing-social-business-platforms-part-3-drupal-commons

http://www.mediacurrent.com/blog/comparing-social-business-platforms-jive-sharepoint-and-drupal-commons

http://www.bluecoda.com/blog/comparing-drupal-commons-vs-jive

http://www.socialsoftwarematrix.org/drupal-commons/

http://buytaert.net/drupal-commons-meet-jive-software

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/enterprise-20/acquias-drupal-commons-social-software-to-take-on-jive-software-007263.php

http://www.r2integrated.com/news/the-news/r2i-launches-new-social-community-platform-comparison-report

http://www.mediacurrent.com/blog/comparing-social-business-platforms-part-2-sharepoint

http://insight.bluecoda.com/content/comparing-drupal-commons-vs-jive

http://www.liventerprise.com/tool/Drupal_Commons

https://www.drupal.org/node/1237540

http://davidbressler.com/2011/01/04/an-investigation-of-buddypress-vs-drupal-commons/

http://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/open-source-social-networking-matchup-buddypress-vs-drupal-commons/

http://www.designwall.com/blog/wordpress-as-a-cms-a-side-by-side-comparison-with-joomla-drupal/

https://www.acquia.com/blog/tale-two-roadmaps-drupal-vs-jive

http://www.cmscritic.com/list-of-social-network-software/

Jive was the most mentioned product among the results of Internet articles dealing with comparison of Drupal Commons.

Sharepoint and Wordpress were mentioned as well, though in much less extend.

6.2 Snapshot of the Developed Website

The snapshot of the entire site (code, files, and database) is in the form a zip archive.It is available for download in the Information System of Masaryk University.

II