Your Mountain Bike YADS

Last night I got reintroduced to the YourMTB.com website which is a pretty cool mountain biking community site. It's built on the Drupal platform and is the first in a series of adventure sports enthusiast sites being created by Enthusiast Group. It's great to see, first of all the functionality that they were able to create, but also a well done, high-quality and attractive site implemented using everyday Drupal modules. Making it Yet Another Drupal Site - YADS.

Mountain Biking Social Networking/Citizen Journalism

It's a social networking and citizen journalism site wrapped up into one with the niche focus on the mountain biking community. So, you can see reviews of mountain biking products or user submitted mountain biking photos but it's also got a community aspect in multiple forms such as forums and community events.

Support the IMBA

They currently have a pretty cool deal going on where if you become a member and add your moutain biking photo to the site, they'll give $5 to the IMBA. That's a great deal and they haven't hit their limit yet!

Fun Features for Drupal

When I say "well done, high-quality" the stuff I'm talking about is some of the small details they've implemented. Specifically, creating new content redirects you to your user tracker page. At first this struck me as an odd place to redirect rather than the page itself. Then I realized the motivational effect this could have - it's like saying "here's the stuff you've created, why haven't you created more?". They are using the userpoints and buddylist modules to help promote networking and giving content to the site. The theme is littered with calls to action to post more photos, videos, stories. This worked well for me - after joining one of the little "calls to action" is what got me to upload my photo - and get the $5 donated to IMBA.

When people say "it's hard to theme Drupal" I think they just don't know how to design in general. The folks working on YourMTB.com are clearly showing how to create a great theme to shows off a vibrant site and motivates users to add more content and interact with the community.