I noticed the title of this blog entry matches the title of my last one with only one slight word change. But the difference between the two titles is rather significant. "Community Plumbing" refers to the mechanics of Drupal itself, while actually building an online community is something completely else.

I'd like to discuss bridging this gap and using Drupal to quickly build online communities. Building an online community is no easy task. Despite what many website salesmen will tell you, the old mantra of "Build it and they will come..." doesn't apply anymore. Building an online community takes money, time and hard work.

But if your community is successful, the rewards can be significant. Success stories abound about webmasters turned millionaires like Jeremy Schoemaker. How did Jermey make his first $100,000 Adsense Check? Why building online communities of course.

So in future entries I will describe my trial and tribulations in trying to build an online community. Be forewarned, it will be rather technical and geeky. I am a huge proponent of Drupal so expect all the articles to be Drupal centric. However, the lessons can be applied to any website. Drupal or otherwise.

If you are reading this article from either Digg or Reddit, please log on and give me your feedback. Integrating sites like digg and reddit into Drupal will be one of my first articles, so I would be interested in hearing any ideas you may have.

Normally I would have anonymous comments enabled, but this blog is already being bombarded with spam. So please log in to leave comments. I hate registering for every site, so I hate asking, but I hope to write about overcoming that problem by using Drupal and OpenID in future entries.