Making a Social Music Site in Drupal, Part I

I had an idea for a website the other day: I play the guitar, and I have a terrible memory. So, when I come up with a song idea, I usually record it on the computer before I forget it. I assume I’m not alone, and a lot of other people have a bunch of half-done songs on their computers too. So here’s the idea for the site: it’s a place where people can upload their half-written parts of songs and combine them with other people’s half-written parts of songs, like a giant imaginary website band. I also added a Twitter-like brevity requirement to keep the Zepplin-esque wanking to a minimum: every upload must be less than 60 seconds.

SPOILER ALERT: If you want to see the (in-progress) site, head to Rifflet.com.

So I need a CMS

My first inclination was to use Wordpress, by far my favorite, and pretty much the only one I have a lot of experience with. I’ve done a couple sites in Joomla, but I thought the back-end was terrible and most of the (free) templates were tough to customize and were giant, table-filled messes. (Feel free to argue in the comments–I know Joomla’s pretty popular.)

Jamroom

I also looked around for a dedicated MP3-related CMS. The first one I found was the not-open-source Jamroom. Jamroom is a great program for creating band and artist community sites, but it was too much for what I want to do. It’s basically a myspace-in-a-box site for bands. The free version allows up to 5 profiles, and you can buy a license to host 25, 100 or unlimited profiles. It was easy to use and install, but I want my site to focus on the sharing unfinished songs, not a place to promote your band and sell albums.

Jinzora is another interesting option, but again, it seems tough to customize. It is made to be a streaming media server with lots of ways to organize your content, and there’s a smiling stock-photo girl on the website, so it must be good.

Next stop: Pligg

Back to the free stuff. If you don’t know, Pligg is the open source version of Digg. Install it, and there it is: a complete Digg clone with vote up/down links, just waiting for your clever blog post about the 50 best Facebook apps. I briefly thought this was the way to go–the emphasis is on the content itself, not the content creator (like Jamroom) and people can vote on the best songs to go on the front page. Unfortunately, according to the Pligg forums, there’s no way for users to upload audio files. Instead they’d have to link to files on a different server, which kind of defeats the point. And really, who only wants to hear the songs that have been voted most popular?

Why not Wordpress again?

I probably could have. Wordpress makes a great CMS, but in my opinion, it’s not so good as the basis for a community site with lots of uses. There are some exceptions, like OpenDesigns.org, but I’m guessing there’s been a lot of work done beyond the normal WP installation, and I am definitely not a programmer. Wordpress does allow audio uploads and playback, but as it is a blog engine, I think Wordpress, in its native form, is better suited to a small group of writers and a large group of front-end users.

On to Drupal

I’ve heard great things about Drupal, but never had a chance to try it. Like Joomla and Wordpress, it has a huge user base and a thriving community. It also has a number of free themes available, and tons of plug-ins (Drupal calls them “modules”) to add functions to your site. One of these is the entire key to making the whole site possible: the Audio module.

It doesn’t have a very exciting name, but the Audio module lets Drupal users upload audio files for public viewing and even includes an inline flash player to play the files without downloading them (assuming the mp3 file is encoded at 44khz, which kind of sucks). It can even read ID3 tag data from the file to automatically read the artist and title information. This seems like to way to go.

I’ll have more in Part 2 about customizing my Drupal theme and setting up the site.