Future Express: a Drupal based international train travel community site (and more)

"Create a site where people can log their international train travels, and show those trails clearly on a map. People should be able to easily add their own photos, videos and blog posts about their travels, and be able to browse other users' content. Include a point system where users with more points are more visible than others. The site should evolve towards an international train travel community site. Oh, and make it all happen within 2 months' time."

That's a (very) brief description of the site that the NCRV, a Dutch broadcasting organisation, asked us to build for the web branch of their Future Express project.

Future Express homepage

The Future Express project is a cross-media project, consisting of an interactive website, a TV documentary series with weekly episodes, a digital TV channel and radio documentaries. In the TV series, several social and economic issues are discussed: globalisation, migration, the search for identity in an ever faster changing world. They wanted to allow viewers of the programme to get together on line to dig deeper into the topics treated in the TV series.

But the website had to be more than just an on line presence of the TV show: the NCRV wanted it to be a community site that can exist on its own, even after the documentary series has ended. The Future Express website allows viewers of the TV programme to discuss topics treated in the TV series by means of forum discussions, to meet other people interested in train travels and share travel stories and multimedia content linked to those travels.

Logging train travels

Since train travels are at the center of everything, a key feature of the Future Express website is the ability to log train travels - a 'trail' - and to attach blog posts, photos and video to them. To allow the easy creation of a trail, we created a CCK content type for this. In the content type, a user can select train stations through a hierarchical select menu - the list of 35.000 train stations is predefined, using data we fetched from the OpenStreetMap database. Since not all areas of the globe are covered this way, users can also add their own trainstations.

Once a user submits his or her trail node, the trail is plotted on a Google map. A seperate blog post, detailing this process, will follow in the next week or so.

Future Express trail page

Future express international

The NCRV aims to make Future Express an international project: there are already local series planned in Austria and South-Africa, and more are likely to follow. To translate this to the web, we created one main community site, which would serve as the central hub for all Future Express community activity. The local, per series sites would be rather static, containing the trails that are featured in the TV series, along with some aggregated content coming from the main community site. On the local sites, teasers will be shown to engage people in the international community site.

To allow the easy set up of local sites, we decided to use Zen theme as a starting point for the Future Express-site and created a general theme for the community site. For the local sites, we create a subtheme of this base theme, and adapt it where needed. Combined, Drupal's multisite feature and subtheming abilities allows for speedy site setup.

Community features

The NCRV asked us to build a website that could keep on running, even after the TV documentary had ended. Meaning the site had to contain several community features to facilitate this process: the evolution from a site directly linked to a TV series into a seperate train travel community site. We included things like a Facebook-style news Future Expressed (using Views), that shows related content (based on similar tags) to logged in users. Also, we re-named the typical profile page into a user's 'passport': on their passport, a user can enter the countries she visited, select the countries she would like to visit in the future, and so on.

We also added a point system that allows more active users to be more visible - we evaluated userpoints for this feature, but found it to be 'too much' for our use case, so we ended up writing our own trimmed down version of the userpoints module. Briefly, it works like this: a user gets a certain amount of points for comments, trails, etc. If a user reaches a predefined number of points, a flag is set (using the amazing flag module), and a stamp is displayed on the user's passport page.

Future Express passport page