iHubbub
When working from home a home worker, freelancer or business owner can often become isolated and your business can become stagnant due to lack of resources, funds and sharing of skills that comes naturally in a work environment.
iHubbub provides a place where our members can mix socially, share their skills, learn new skills and know that they are not alone. iHubbub brings together like-minded homeworkers to share in their experiences and maximise the opportunities for networking, which is critical to growing a home business.
We used the functionality of the Drupal Commons modules as a baseline and in some cases we customised what the module functions could do. In almost all the modules we have changed the standard Drupal layout so it looks and feels like iHubbub’s own community brand.
We also added a new area to iHubbub Drupal Commons base so members can pin their home business or freelance consultancy to our map and for visitors to search for these members on the map. Essentially we are giving our members the chance to … put their business on the map …so to speak. See http://ihubbub.com/pins and http://search-home-business-map.
We recently added the pinterest style for our photo galleries and now our members showcase their fantastic looking business products or services, their home offices and even their home working pets! Take a look at what our members are sharing: http://ihubbub.com/photos.
We are also soon to launch an online shop using Ubercart and some extended modules that Ubercart will allow our members to sell their products or their consultancy time directly from iHubbub. This is under development currently and we are very excited to reveal this to our members over the next few weeks.
iHubbub provides a place where our members can mix socially, share their skills, learn new skills and know that they are not alone. iHubbub brings together like-minded homeworkers to share in their experiences and maximise the opportunities for networking, which is critical to growing a home business.
Drupal was able to give us great community functionality and working with the modules we were able to customise and theme the modules to brand iHubbub with its own look and feel. So much so, that large corporate sponsors are already very keen on getting involved with our community network.