16 Different Clones You Can Build with Drupal

drupal clones

Drupal is an excellent choice for a content management system (CMS). However, many people only see it as a simple CMS, a site to build a landing page or two. But Drupal is much more than that. Not only is Drupal easy to theme, it’s got a wide range of built in functionality and a large community powering the popular CMS.

One of the great things about Drupal is that you can build almost any sort of site that you can imagine, with the help of a couple modules. Want to go beyond the basics of a simple CMS? Drupal has an excellent API that allows you to extent nearly any aspect of the software. In fact, many people have started to talk about using Drupal as a framework, as it’s robust, well written, handles lots of traffic, and has a large and helpful community.

So, if you’re thinking about building your next big site, here are a few ways that you can take existing modules and turn a project quickly, without needing to make any custom modules.

A quick note: I don’t think it’s a great idea to make exact clones of existing sites and slap a new name on them. Clones hardly become as popular as the original site. This article is merely to show the power of Drupal and what can be done with limited time and no development budget.

1. Digg Clone

There’s plenty of Digg clone software out there, but it’s pretty simple to make a site that allows users to submit links to content, vote, comment and moderate the submitted links. It’s even easier when that functionality is all wrapped up into a single module. Drigg creates an identical voting site that allows users to add web links, vote on them, share stories, and many more features.

digg

2. Blog

This is one of the most obvious and common uses for Drupal, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important. Drupal comes primed for blogging straight out of the box, and there are many modules available that can enhance the commenting and overall blogging functionality.

3. News Portal

For those of you wanting a site that can showcase lots of information like Yahoo! or some of the other news portals, Drupal has you covered. Thanks to an excellent module called Views and some custom categories, you can quickly create many different types of content and display them in different ways on the homepage. Views is an indispensable module for a Drupal site. It’s a rare occasion that I’m not using the module on a site that I’m developing.

4. Robust user site

Here is where I think Drupal shines brighter than most (if not all) content management systems. Drupal has an excellent user management system, user profiles and even OpenID right out of the box. It also has modules that can connect to Twitter, Facebook, and it’s easy to connect to other authentication gateways with the use of custom modules.

Drupal also has a stellar module called Organic Groups that allows users to “organize” themselves into groups. Each group can have it’s own homepage, blocks, themes, taxonomy and more.

5. Awareness site

If you’re wanting to build a site specifically for a cause or organization, Drupal makes that easy as well. Aside from the Organic Groups plugin and other community-friendly features, there’s a donation module that accepts payments from Paypal, and shows the donating users on a donation page.

CiviCRM (demo) is a constituent relationship management solution module that was specifically created for advocacy and non-profit groups. Over 5,000 organizations use CiviCRM, and it’s well-supported and has many sub-modules for more specific advocacy needs.

Another great Drupal module for developing an awareness site is the Connect module. Connect allows you to easily create petitions, emails or fax campaigns.

6. Twitter Clone

Yeah, yeah… the world doesn’t need another Twitter clone, right? Well, I tend to disagree. The concept of sites and communities built around short, cross-platform messaging systems are a phenomena that just aren’t going away any time soon. With Drupal, it could be just as easy. Drupal’s Microblog module copies most of the features of Twitter. Micro-messaging, following users and public timelines.

7. File Storage Site

File storage sites like Drop.io or Box.net could be created with Drupal and the help of a module like Media Mover. Media Mover allows you to take uploaded files and copy them over to Amazon S3, the highly-scalable data storage system.

8. Flickr Clone

Photo sites like Flickr and Photobucket could also be created with the Image module and Views. The Image module gives users the ability to upload images, and then creates thumbnails and galleries from the uploads. Users could also comment on the photos using the built-in commenting functionality.

9. Delicious Clone

It turns out that making a bookmarking site like Delicious is fairly trivial in Drupal. There are several options for modules that give users the ability to post bookmarks to their Drupal account.

10. YouTube Clone

If you’re wanting to build a video sharing site like YouTube, Drupal has some modules that can greatly help with that. FlashVideo adds functionality to convert uploaded files to flash, and then moves them over to Amazon S3 if desired. FlashVideo also provides the ability to embed the videos, just like the big boys.

11. Amazon Clone

Trying to recreate the powerhouse’s ecommerce dominance is a tall order, but if any CMS is capable of it, Drupal is. Drupal has a few stellar ecommerce modules like Ecommerce and Ubercart. Both of these modules have an extensive feature list that make it easier to create an ecommerce powerhouse.

12. Tumblr Clone

Creating a social aggregation site with Drupal is easy enough with the excellent Activity Stream module. Activity Steam allows you to pull in user’s activity on social sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Qik, StumbleUpon and many others.

13. Blogger Clone

If you’re wanting to start a blog host like Blogger or Wordpress.com, Drupal is easily equipped to do that. Drupal has a blog module that comes shipped with the package, and it allows every site member the ability to have a blog.

14. Blog network

Blog networks like Performancing and WiseBread rely on Drupal to power their networks. This requires the use of the built-in blog module. Member’s blog posts all end up on the homepage of the site by default, and you could modify how the member’s blogs looked with the help of the Views module.

15. News Aggregator

I built the LifeRemix network site with Drupal and a single module to aggregate all of our blogger’s posts. The site updates itself without any monitoring from me.

16. Friendfeed

By utilizing the excellent Activity Stream module, it would be quite easy to build a FriendFeed clone. As Drupal already comes shipped with an awesome set of user and profile modules, a quick Friendfeed clone could be made in a matter of hours, depending on your design skills.

Use your imagination! These are by no means the only uses for the popular CMS. I’d love to hear more examples of sites built with Drupal, or possible sites that I’ve left off the list.


About the Author:

Glen Creator of http://webjackalope.com

Editor of Web Jackalope. Follow Glen on Twitter.

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58 Comments

  1. Meshach  May 4, 2009 at 10:20 am

    Nice stuff, thanks Glen.

  2. Ryan Dempsey  May 4, 2009 at 10:42 am

    Good stuff! I’d add basecamp-like project management too.

  3. Alb3rt1  May 4, 2009 at 3:21 pm

    Nice post! I think it’s time for me to learn using Drupal ;)

  4. NazarDesign  May 4, 2009 at 6:18 pm

    Different Clones You Can Build with Wordpress?

  5. the spell checker  May 4, 2009 at 6:36 pm

    i think you mistyped ‘extenD’ in the following sentence:

    Want to go beyond the basics of a simple CMS? Drupal has an excellent API that allows you to extent nearly any aspect of the software

  6. Edward.H  May 4, 2009 at 8:10 pm

    Good job! this is a great article,I am a big fan of Drupal,I’v submitted a link of this article to our website( Drupal power) in order to share it with more people.See
    http://www.webmasterclip.com/story/16-different-clones-you-can-build-drupal

  7. Holly Hopper  May 4, 2009 at 9:13 pm

    Great Post! I always love seeing what can be done with Drupal. My favorite CMS by far! Go Drupal!

  8. mary  May 5, 2009 at 12:37 am

    Excellent post. Drupal is definitely a powerful CMS and easily extensible. Always looking for new Drupal project, this post has given me some excellent ideas.

    thanks!

  9. James  May 5, 2009 at 2:29 am

    This list shows the power of Drupal, not a simple CMS!

    http://shetoldme.com/Technology/How-to-build-16-different-clones-with-Drupal

    Thank you Glen,
    James

  10. omi  May 5, 2009 at 5:10 am

    Pretty useless overview, to lay things out exactly as you want often requires more work than simply installing a module such as views or ecommerce. Welcome to nights and days of hook hackery.

  11. Doug  May 5, 2009 at 6:26 am

    I would not recommend the activitystream module. It copies the entire contents of everything in the feeds and posts them as new nodes on your drupal site, instead of just linking to the original content. You end up with thousands of nodes that duplicate stuff on other people’s sites. It adds a lot of noise to your site and you risk copyright issues and google seeing your site as just spam or ripped off content. The author of activitystream has no interest in changing the design of the module or providing more options that would solve this.

    There is a friendfeed module that integrates with the friendfeed site that we are using instead for now.

  12. Jim  May 5, 2009 at 6:27 am

    Added to DrupalSightings.com

  13. Online Hry  May 5, 2009 at 11:26 am

    Drupal is best CMS forever!

  14. Adam Mordecai  May 5, 2009 at 11:40 am

    Actually, we already built a youtube clone in Drupal.

    http://youdrup.com/

    :)

  15. Eric Atkins  May 5, 2009 at 6:45 pm

    You should link to the Twitter clone and Flickr clone that Lullabot built. Both are very cool.

  16. Bèr Kessels  May 6, 2009 at 12:47 am

    .. In theory. In practice the so called “real life constraints΅ render at least half of the possible clones mentioned, undoable.

  17. Rahul Chowdhury  May 6, 2009 at 1:11 am

    And I thought that Drupal is the worst, now I have changed my mind. Trying to build one of these.

  18. Frederico  May 6, 2009 at 5:22 am

    Great post, Glen! Will help me very much with some projects. Thank you! :-)

  19. Manish  May 6, 2009 at 7:28 am

    Very Nice Stuff Glan.

  20. null  May 7, 2009 at 1:04 am

    五反田 風俗

  21. Drupal Themes Garden  May 8, 2009 at 4:25 am

    Nice post.
    It would be great if you could also find some tutorials of “how-to” creating those “clones”.

  22. Sponter  May 9, 2009 at 8:55 pm

    excellent post, thank you very much, i didn’t know so far that drupal is SO powerful

  23. Design-notes  May 11, 2009 at 6:52 am

    has anybody used drupal for any clones?
    I had some experience with drupal and view module. Its not very user friendly…

  24. sinan osan  May 20, 2009 at 4:50 pm

    Very good post welldone

  25. ebeyrent  May 21, 2009 at 8:03 am

    I used Drupal 5 (gasp!) to build Twolia.com, which is essentially a clone of Etsy, MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube all rolled into one site.

  26. Harv  May 21, 2009 at 11:01 am

    Maybe i should try using drupal also.. i’m using joomla for many times but joomla’s suck at SEO and the clean HTML, so i moved to Wordpress, but sometimes i’m still using joomla for the more complex website that wordpress cannot handle it.

    I just wonder if drupal has clean html and good SEO?

  27. Alex Stomp  June 2, 2009 at 2:37 pm

    Great tut man! I love your work! I’ve tried a lot of the big CMS’s and I felt like wordpress was easier to set up and use backend wise, but drupal offered MUCH more freedom when designing.

    Just my input –> Easy = Wordpress; Pro = Drupal

  28. Frank M.  June 10, 2009 at 9:02 pm

    very usefull post. thanks!
    It sounds all very simple. But in reality it is something different.

  29. Suntdar  June 16, 2009 at 7:25 am

    Making Basecamp with Drupal: http://www.doitwithdrupal.com/sessions/basecamp-built-drupal

  30. Phaoloo  July 1, 2009 at 5:08 am

    Really nice tips, they are simple but definitely useful for everyone.

  31. ramon nuez  July 2, 2009 at 8:50 am

    This is a great article. I just started using Drupal. I am simply amazed on what it can do.

  32. forever21  July 6, 2009 at 9:13 pm

    Actually nice article for Drupal lovers, I’m an intermediate web developer for Drupal. I have bookmarked this article.
    Thanks
    David.

  33. Michael  July 12, 2009 at 4:18 pm

    Nice list. Is there a place where you can find more detailed site recipes. I am working on a photo blog and a few other various drupal sites. I am really enjoying how versatile this system tends to be.

  34. Matt  August 11, 2009 at 8:01 am

    Of course you can clone everything with drupal, but also with symfony (much better then drupal due to its orientation to the objects), and, why not, with nearly any framework/cms out there. The question is: why? :)

  35. subcorpus  August 27, 2009 at 9:35 pm

    good stuff here …
    appreciated …

  36. Matthew Hunt  August 27, 2009 at 9:44 pm

    Don’t forget about Lullabot’s Rockclimr. It’s a basecamp clone.

    http://www.rockclimbr.com/project/10/milestones/2009-08-23

  37. IceCreamYou  August 29, 2009 at 5:03 pm

    The Facebook-style Statuses module is significantly more powerful and useful for building Twitter-esque sites than the Microblog module references in this post…

    http://drupal.org/project/facebook_status

  38. Jucedupp  September 15, 2009 at 11:38 pm

    Drupal still sucks. It has the worst admin interface of any well known CMS out there. Remember, the idea behind a CMS is for designer / developer to build and then hand it over to a non-tech savvy client to operate. Drupal fails dismally on usability in the backend arena. It’s by geeks for geeks. Not by geeks for users.

  39. Jucedupp  September 15, 2009 at 11:46 pm

    Just to confirm. I just logged in to the drupal admin demos at drupal.org. Is there actually someone driving this project, establishing some usability standards? The interface is HORRIFIC, seen from an end user point of view. Really. How can someone actually sell this CMS to a client and not hang their heads in shame? There is a real world out there, trekkies…

  40. sumitk  September 20, 2009 at 9:58 pm

    Nice stuff!!

    @Jucedupp we you can juice up admin section of drupal using many modules or themes …. on top of my head the best one is http://drupal.org/project/admin …. this will convert drupal admin section into yummy web2.0 interface. Never forget you got POWER with drupal

  41. ryosaeb4  September 25, 2009 at 9:45 am

    Where Can I find a tutorial to make a Flickr Clone with Drupal?

  42. Tich  October 7, 2009 at 3:19 am

    Cool, Drupal is a wonderful beast !

  43. drupalbjorn  October 21, 2009 at 2:07 am

    interesting read, can’t wait to check out some of these modules :-)

  44. Chris  November 28, 2009 at 4:11 am

    This is a very nice review, give me some inspirations how to works with Drupal. Thank you for this post.

  45. Kuswanto  January 6, 2010 at 4:40 am

    You forget about Intranet. I am using OpenAtrium, a drupal based Intranet for my project management.

    So to speak, it’s kind of a clone of BaseCamp or ActiveCollab.

  46. BarisW  January 6, 2010 at 6:14 am

    Great post, thanks for this!

  47. Michael Hart  January 6, 2010 at 9:02 am

    I’ve also built a volunteer scheduling system similar to a ‘planning center online’ clone. You can’t stop Drupal. With a few really well built, high-powered modules, you can create about anything.

  48. srilatha marru  January 6, 2010 at 9:25 am

    Although Views have to be used for achieving most of the above functionality, Views are very vulnerable. I tried to use views module in drupal 6 with some path auto module. And the Views module never worked even on uninstalling path auto module, reinstalling drupal 6 and so on.

    Now I am really afraid to use views for any of my client projects.

  49. srilatha marru  January 6, 2010 at 9:26 am

    Although Views have to be used for achieving most of the above functionality, Views are very vulnerable. I tried to use views module in drupal 6 with some path auto module. And the Views module never worked even on uninstalling path auto module, reinstalling drupal 6 and so on.

    Now I am really afraid to use views for any of my client projects.

  50. tomexx  January 6, 2010 at 10:43 am

    Nice stuff, thank You.

  51. Jörn  January 7, 2010 at 2:50 am

    If all this can be achieved with Drupal – why do you then use Wordpress for your own site?

  52. Beetbe  January 11, 2010 at 12:17 am

    Excellent post on how to make stuff that uses Drupal

    Thank you

  53. rob  January 13, 2010 at 1:47 pm

    no mention of managingNews either…

  54. abevry  January 17, 2010 at 4:43 pm

    Guys is thre any examples of websites (clones) built with drupal? kind of solid proof?

  55. abevry  January 17, 2010 at 4:51 pm

    @james,
    You are such an A***0L3 to promote your Fvk1n site over here.

    @Admin pls delete such craps and self promoters

  56. David Ing  January 29, 2010 at 10:28 am

    @glenstansberry, I use Drupal primarily for it’s “book” feature, and hadn’t thought about the “clone” features that you portray. It gives me confidence in the platform that I’ve chosen, and I may rethink where I might exercise it more.

  57. anjar  February 1, 2010 at 7:13 am

    nice article, after read this article, i get more spirit to deep learn drupal now..drupal, the best cms now, what you wants, thats you can..thats drupal..

  58. Offshore Ally  February 9, 2010 at 3:32 am

    Thanks for this post, I read this post a while back and started expanding my blog into a community site and its doing real good now. Thanks to you again!

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