Building Social Networks with Drupal: A Comprehensive Guide

In this chapter, let us study about Social Networking in Drupal. Social media is becoming very important these days, Drupal has many social media modules for this purpose. Let us take ShareThis module as our example, you can choose any other of your choice.

Following are the simple steps used to install ShareThis module.

Step 1 − Click ShareThis to visit ShareThis module page and click the Version as shown in the following screen.

Step 2 − Copy the link address of the module as shown in the following screen.

Step 3 − Next, go to Modules and click Install new module as shown in the following screen.

Step 4 − Now, paste the link address that you copied in step(2) and click Install as shown in the following screen.

Step 5 − You will see the following screen. Click Enable newly added modules.

Step 6 − Next, go to Modules. Enable the module and click Save configuration as shown in the following screen.

Step 7 − Go to Configuration, under WEB SERVICES and click ShareThis as shown in the following screen.

Step 8 − The following screen pops up.

Step 9 − You can click any of the button style, under the Display section to share your content online as shown in the following screen.

Step 10 − Click any of the services you want to remove. You can also use Extra services like Google Plus One and Facebook Like by checking them as shown in the following screen.

You can choose services from the Possible Services section and you can also remove or re-order services from Selected Service section.

Step 11 − Next, click Context as shown in the following screen to configure where the ShareThis widget should appear.

Following the details of the fields present on the screen.

• Under Location you can choose any of Node content or Block or Links area.

• Under Node Types you can select Article and Basic page, if you want ShareThis widget to appear on it.

• If you select Comments you can display ShareThis on comments as well.

• The Weight of the widget determines the location on the page where it will appear.

Step 12 − Next, select Advanced as shown in the following screen.

Following are the details of the fields present on the preceding screen.

• When you install the module, a random publisher key will be created.

• Twitter Suffix will optionally append a Twitter handle, or text, so that you get a ping when someone shares an article.

• Twitter Handle will be used when sharing on twitter.

• Twitter recommends will specify a twitter handle to be recommended to the user while sharing.

• If Display ShareThis widget on hover is disabled, ShareThis widget will be displayed on click instead of hover.

• If Display count "0" instead of "New" is checked, zero is displayed instead of New in the count for content not yet shared.

• Display short URL will display either the full or the shortened URL.

• CopyNShare will measure copy and shares of your site's content or URLs as checked respectively.

Step 13 − After checking all the details, click Save configuration as shown in the following screen.

Step 14 − Now you can see the social media buttons appearing on the Article page.

The End! should you have any inquiries, we encourage you to reach out to the Vercaa Support Center without hesitation.