Drupal Tuesday: Social Networking

Since it is still Tuesday for a little while, I thought I would post this week's editon of Drupal Tuesdays, which isn't so much about Drupal, but about stuff we use within Drupal to market and add content to our Drupal site.

I decided to take on the much-disused mantle of marketing director of the Observer this week, and took the opportunity to spruce up our About Us page, Facebook page, and other profiles of social networking sites that we use on a regular basis. 

While I don't have solid numbers, publicizing the Observer on social networking sites was the only really strategy we had last semester, and we ended up with a good amount of traffic and readers from all around the world.  While this has fallen into disuse as we've gone on, I'm going to suggest to my esteemed colleagues that we start afresh, and see if our numbers improve.  But, it takes continued effort, and that's the hard part.

Believe it or not, the About Us page was the hard part.  In order to get it into the state you see it now, it took about four hours of poking around in the back end, and I think it paid off.

The first thing I did was create new user roles for the system.  This involves giving people permission to do different things on the site, and organizing the users in the system according to those roles.  I created a staff role (for people on the current staff), an alumni role (for staff that have moved on to bigger and better things), and a contributor role (for undergraduates or other people we take submissions from time to time).  I then had to assign all the users in the system one of these roles.

I then created a view that creates a list of the names of each user that has a certain role.  Views is an extremely powerful module that provides an easy way to create database queries that filter and display certain kinds of data and display it the way you want.  I used the Insert View module to insert the output of a view into a page, and voila!  A self-updating list of staff members that changes when users' roles change from semester to semester, year to year.

I did several other things, so here's a comprehensive list of new stuff to pay attention to:

• Updated "About Us" page with a self-updating staff list.  Click on a user to go to that user's profile.
• Bylines are now linked to user profiles.  Click on a name in a byline to go to that staffer's profile page.
• Updated our Facebook page with our blog and podcast feeds.  Our Facebook page is an excellent place to check every once in a while, because it automatically updates when there is new content on the Observer!
• Set up the Twitter hashtag #auobserver.  If you would like to talk about the Observer on Twitter, use this hashtag to let us know!
• Put more information on our Vimeo profile.