Hey dfabri,

Welcome. First off, a couple of thoughts; This sounds like a huge project, and as you've said you're just learning Druapl, I'd strongly suggest you build a couple of simple sites first before you jump headlong into a coding nightmare. Second, don't simply clone any site. Certainly it's advised you survey successful sights for ideas you can glean, but always tailor your experience to your audience. Simply because you hate Facebook doesn't mean your kids will, and unless you can provide something fresh, they have little incentive to utilize your alternative.

First, don't know if you have any D6 experience, but when working in D7, having An Introduction to Entities is a big help. Don't have a D7 reference handy, but here is a good D6 demonstration of node references. User References are a similar concept and would be what you would use when tagging people. Checkout this Comparison of node / entity references and relationships modules for some options available.

Creating a dashboard could be a usability improvement when users view their own wall. Here is a Comparison of Dashboard modules. And there are lots of activity stream modules which could display user activity. Of course, Views would factor heavily here, as well. Organic Groups would be what you'd use for group pages.

Also check out an attempt at a facebook clone (the links in the initial post 404 but the comments are valuable) as well as this Stackexchange discussion.

Again, quite an ambitious first project! Please keep us posted on how things go!

Thanks for your reply.

First I probably should have been clearer on my experience with drupal. I don't consider myself as an experienced user or even an amateur user, I have built a couple of sites before with drupal. One being my own personal site. I understand how it works, but I don't know programming. I can do html but thats about it, anything else I can possibly look through code and possibly work out what it could be in reference to, but that's about it.

The reason I hate Facebook is because of all the problems it creates between our youth and other people and is really a big issue in our youth ministry at the moment. I am wanting to create a place that could be free from that.

Also creating our own place allows the youth who aren't allowed to have Facebook to have a place they would be allowed to go that their parents can know it is safe. (I am providing a "Parent's Account" so that they can view and monitor what their kids do on the site.)

The site I have built for my youth group is here : http://newheartchurch.com.au/imprintyouthministries

Thanks again.

Also kind of related,

I have built a node based gallery. I am using the "Disqus" commenting module and service. Is there any way I can have the "disqus" comment form come up in a popup rather than having to open each individual image node or have the image node load up in a popup?

And is there a way I can batch upload images as nodes? At the moment I am uploading each image one at a time as a node and it is a very laborious task. I am wanting each image as a node as I want to be able to comment on each individual image.

Or can you suggest a better way of doing it.

dfabri, great to see another Aussie on these forums!

The youth sites looks pretty good, unfortunatly I know nothing about Drupal, but I will be watching this post with interest.

- Im a Joomla guy.

dfabri, I've never used http://drupal.org/project/popup but among other features it claims to "allow any block to be displayed as a popup."

Also, check out http://drupal.org/node/1044504. From skimming the comments, it looks like http://drupal.org/project/plupload is the crowd favorite, although a few alternatives are mentioned. The project page explains all this, but check out http://drupal.org/project/plup or http://drupal.org/sandbox/axe312/1414286 (Bulk Media Upload claims to be exactly what you're looking for; "a new node will be created for every file." It is a sandbox project, but this type of module either works or it doesn't, and you can likely uninstall it after you load up your images. So the risk is much less than having ongoing dependency on an experimental module.) http://groups.drupal.org/node/155764 or http://groups.drupal.org/node/20291 might prove helpful, as well. (Although a quick skim does not always make it clear if each file is saved as it's own node.)

Lastly, Re: "I am providing a "Parent's Account" so that they can view and monitor what their kids do on the site." The kids know that, right?

Thanks Heaps for the info.

Re: "Parent's Account", yeah. I haven't hid it. There is a button on the main page "For The Parents".

Great site dfabri. I was looking at the source for you site and it appears that your css and js aggregation is not turned on. I only mention this because you are newish to Drupal but by enabling this you should notice a huge performance boost. You can find this at admin/config/development/performance Bob also has a great module on building 'facebook type UX' in drupal I think it may be for Drupal 6 however.

One thing I didn't understand, you are saying that you hate Facebook.
But at the same time you want to create a site similar to facebook with all its attributes like profile, WALL and etc.
Then what is the sense in making a replica of facebook?????