After selecting the latest version of Drupal at that time, I spent considerable time on getting familiar with the default setting of the application. I found that Drupal has many built in features and somehow a complicated ACP. Also, I went over different supportive websites that offer extra themes, modules and other solutions. Drupal offers different forms of social networking. It has forums, blogs, pages, books and stories.

I focused on the forum and thought about a suitable subject. At the end, I decided to design a forum for CGU housing students. I felt it is a clear and a good idea for the project and for the resident’s community.

Instead of adapting different themes in the beginning, I preferred to keep the default theme and customize it in order to avoid any incompatibilities and get the most out of the available modules and services. Then, after building the forum and making backup, it will be safer to play with the themes. I have learned this strategy from my previous experience with WordPress, MediaWiki and PHPBB3.

The next step was to find a backup model. I installed the Backup & Migrate module and tested it. It is now scheduled to do backup every 24 hours and keep the latest two backups files. Also, I thought it is important to protect the website from spam and hackers. So, I installed Akismet and Mollom modules.

I created a container and different forums which I believe the most important to begin with for a new housing like: Wireless-Telephone-Cable, Lost & Found, Events, Housing Announcements, Items for Sale and Suggestions. Then I added dummy users and controlled their permissions to be authenticated users. I tested their roles and added contents.

Through the ACP, I controlled the needed permissions for each module and made sure that I have full admin privileges and suitable access for the authenticated users and anonymous ones. For example, a registered user has been given an authority to create a forum topic and posts and cannot delete contents; an anonymous user can use “Tell a Friend” service” in order to help making the forum more popular.

I have added many modules that support both the administrator job and the user’s side, either registered or anonymous. Some important additions include a customized search, web statistics, chat room, weather info, relationships maker, FAQs, job posting, tell a friend, media support and more.

There were some major difficulties I faced. In the beginning, I tried to customize the forum to appear as a traditional one. So, I used a module called Advanced Forum which is supposed to do the job, but it did not wok. Also, after installing some modules, the modules page in the ACP did not appear which made it hard to disable the modules that did not work