MECLUB Social Networking

Overview

MECLUB (currently mobile-only) is a cutting-edge social networking site that includes the ability to find a date, travel partner, mentor, or friend. This site includes significant business logic, such as a feature-rich shopping, an invite tool, and a subscription engine.

The proprietor of MECLUB needed a feature-rich site in a very short timespan, so the Drupal Content Management System (CMS) was an ideal solution because it provides a solid base architecture and over 6,000 plug-and-play modules. These modules, combined with some custom logic, allowed MECLUB to be developed rapidly with few resources.

This was a big win for MECLUB because it allowed a relatively complex site to be developed without any venture funding in place. Once the MECLUB website was developed, it allowed the company to pursue venture capitol, advertisers, and prolific content creators.

Goals

The primary goals of MECLUB include:

• A feature-rich social media site that stands out from other sites by the way in which content is organized and displayed.
• A dating section called ME+ (see Fig. 3), which features a secure commerce solution (products, shopping cart, etc.), people matching logic, paid alerts, faceted people search, and private messaging.
• A secure and spam-free environment in which users feel comfortable sharing public and private details knowing that the information shared will only be available to the intended audience.
• A web platform that scales as the number of users and content increases, while maintaining an acceptable speed.

Page Types and Business Logic

Registered users of MECLUB may post content to the site and interact with other users. The types of posts available and their business logic include the following:

• Alert Message: users that wish to participate in the dating section of MECLUB called ME+ may like to interact with other users. This is done on ME+ is by sending the other user an Alert message. Alert messages may be purchased with ME+ credit or sent for free, depending on the type of alert. After a user indicates the desire to communicate with another user with an Alert message, they traverse the shopping cart and apply available credit (or purchase more credit), then are taken directly to the alert message form. Once the alert is created, the message recipient receives an email notification indicating they have an unread alert.
• Business Profile: allows users to enter information about their business, such as title, location, description, business category, photos, and contact information. Users may follow businesses by subscribing to the business profile page, socially bookmark a business, and comment on a business using a simple comment from.
• ME+ Private Message: once a user sends an alert, the recipient and the sender may opt to become a match. Users that are matched may send private messages to each other, which consists of a title and message body.
• General Page (see Fig. 4): allows users to let other users know about upcoming events, a favorite restaurant, recent travel adventures, or a hot topic.

Other Requirements

Because MECLUB doubles as both a social media and dating platform, the site required several features, including the following:

• A home page hub with recent businesses and posts, top travel, restaurants, members, events, and topic of the week (see Fig. 1)
• Searchable listing pages for travel, restaurants, members, events, and fun activities (see Fig. 2)
• An invitation tool that integrates with Google and Yahoo
• Subscription platform for tracking pages, entire page sets, and tagged content
• A reward system that grants credit for use with ME+ when users perform certain tasks
• Simple user forms for adding/editing content, including a WYSIWYG editor (see Fig. 4)
• Geo-locations for users and posts
• Content sharing, liking, disliking, and flagging
• Significant SEO integration.

Outcome

Using the Drupal CMS, Webdrips helped develop MECLUB and ME+ on a secure platform that will easily scale with the number of users and posts while keeping the development time and cost reasonable.