Social Networking Modules
This is a list of possible social networking modules to use for a Drupal-based ELN. We try to include only those that are known to be fairly mature and reliable. User ratings of these modules are available on the Drupal Modules website.
| Module Name | General Description | Use in an ELN |
|---|---|---|
| Advanced Forum | Advanced Forum is a theme/glue module that enhances Drupal's core forum module. The included styles provide the look typically found in stand alone forum software and the code provides some of the functionality, mostly related to the end user experience. By adding other Drupal contributed modules, many of which are automatically used by Advanced Forum, you can achieve much of what stand alone software provides. Because it uses the core forum module, it uses the node and comment system built into Drupal and is completely integrated, not a bridge. | Forums of course are very useful for ongoing discussions about matters that persist over time. In the context of an ELN, discussions could be far ranging - from discussions about science and the scientific method to discussions about the appropriate technologies and features in an ELN. |
| Author Pane | Author Pane is a block of information about a given user, like those typically found on a forum post, but can be used in other places as well. From core, it collects the user picture, name, join date, online status, contact link, and profile information. In addition, any module or theme can feed it more information via the preprocess system. All of this information is then gathered and displayed using a template file. | Not vital for an ELN, but it improves aesthetics. |
| Notifications | This is a complete Subscriptions/ Notifications Framework aiming at extendability and scalability. It allows any number of plug-ins defining new event types or subscription types or a different user interface. Dependent on the Messaging framework and the Token module. | For an ELN this can be useful not only for notifications being sent out by the ELN admin, but also for ELN members to subscribe to feeds about items in the ELN. For example, one scientist could subscribe to the feeds from another scientists experiments. |
| User Relationships | Allows users to create named relationships between each other. It is the basic building block for a social networking site, or any site where users are aware of one another, and communicate. | Important for members being able to communicate with one another and have appropriate access control to data and data analysis documents. |
| Content Access | This module allows you to manage permissions for content types by role and author. It allows you to specifiy custom view, edit and delete permissions for each content type. Optionally you can enable per content access settings, so you can customize the access for each content node. | Important for members being able to have appropriate access control to data and data analysis documents. Requires the ACL module |
| Tribune | Provides an advanced discussion space, a chatroom, for a website, a kind of enhanced shoutbox meant to be used for real discussion, with dynamical highlighting of answers and references. It allows users to chat in real time (far more reactive than a shoutbox) without having to use a separate client (unlike an IRC channel, for exemple). | Valuable for more real-time discussions than a forum allows and provides a more threaded view than a chatbox or a shoutbox so that responses can be more targeted to a given discussion. |
| Community Tags | Allows members of the community to tag content, and tracks who tagged what and when. | Useful allowing members to tag what experiments or data is most interesting to them, and for the entire community to know which experiments seem to have the most impact as a whole. |
| Homebox | Home box allows members to have a page that behave similar to iGoogle, Netvibes or BBC.co.uk. | Not vital, but it would allow each member to have a somewhat personalized home page. |