I recently attended the first Drupalcamp South Florida and the Key Note speaker was Brian House from Acquia. His talk involved community building with Acquia Commons.
I had heard of Drupal Commons, but I wasn't aware of all of the features that it provided out of the box.
I also have been following with some interest Google's new language, Dart, that has recently been released. I am always excited to learn a new programming language and this one interested me since it is obviously designed for the web!
I had joined the Dart Mailing List and had been following some of the discussions there regarding this new language.
On the way back home form South Florida, I began to wonder about how the community could rally behind this GPL language and then it hit me: Why not set up a Drupal site and give the community a place to discuss and learn.
Combining the power of Drupal with the built-in community building features of Acquia Commons seemed like a perfect fit.
After diving in to Commons, I realized that the majority of the needs of the community could be met right out of the box with little to no modifications needed.
I did add a few contributed modules, namely:
- XML Sitemap for search engine submissions
- Add to Any for social sharing among multiple services
- Google Plus One, for +1 sharing with Google
- Piwik for opensource site analytics
In a short period of time I had an Acquia Commons site ready to go. One caveat I found is that commons needs a little more memory than some of my other Drupal sites, so I bumped my apache memory limit up to 256MB.
If you're interested in joining the community, head on over to dartplanet.org and join us!
