social networking

So you've read that Trellon does work with a platform called Drupal, and that we build sites for various businesses and political organizations that want to make use of new "social" technologies to connect with their clients, and connect their clients with each other. But this sounds pretty abstract, and "social networking" sounds like something that bored teenagers do anyway? What follows is an account of our work with social media and networking and a Drupal solution, one of the country's leading non-profit health care systems.

Alegent Health is based in the mid-west and they have nine hospitals, more than a hundred service locations, and employ 1,300 physicians and a staff of 9,000. Alegent came to us in search of a new online social media platform to not only connect their staff and resources with new and expectant mothers; but most importantly to allow these women to connect with each other.

Facebook's newsfeed feature introduced social network users to continuous updates of news about the goings-on in the lives of their friends and contacts. Activity aggregators have turned out to be a pretty useful feature for social networking sites, and can even be a little addictive when done right. Most sites that bill themselves as a social or professional network now have some kind of newsfeed, friend feed, lifestream or other feed.

The Activity module is your best bet if you want to aggregate activities from within your Drupal community. Its API is a little more complicated than similar modules like Activity Stream, but allows for a greater awareness of the context of activity items, so that their appearance can change depending on who is viewing them. Activity comes with seven contrib modules that cover most of the common activities on a community-based Drupal site (creating/editing nodes, adding/removing buddies, voting on content, etc.). This makes it very easy to get activity streams up and running on your site quickly.