iwanttospeak.net - a worldwide language learning community

iwanttospeak.net is a language learning community, based on the „Tandem Method“. This is a common and effective method to learn a foreign language. The idea: Two native speakers teach each other their respective language in short written or spoken conversations. On iwanttospeak.net users can register with the following key information about themselves: native language(s) desired practicing language(s) current location After registration users can search for a matching language partner. They can start chatting over the website or (if the locations matches) they can meet in real life, preferably a Cafè, to practice speaking. During this session we want to share our experience using Drupals army of contributed modules for „rapid prototyping“. We also would like to discuss, which contributed modules are essential for developing websites with Drupal. We think that knowing a number of contributed „keymodules“ is absolutely essential for developing websites with Drupal. We will show how we used the Bio module for collecting all user related information during the registration process and storing this information as nodes. A key feature of iwanttospeak.net is the worldwide proximity search for users. We will show how we used Googles API for the geospatial information and how we use this information to calculate the distance between users worldwide. iwanttospeak.net is currently available in 9 languages (including Russian, Hungarian, German, Italian). All translations were contributed by members of the iwanttospeak.net language community with little technical knowledge and no Drupal experience. We will demonstrate how we used i18n module and a slightly modified version of the Localization client Module to let users directly translate the interface. Finally we will show our approach for developing a custom theme for iwanttospeak.net. We‘ll giving examples of the user profile pages and the registration form. We will be happy to discuss feedback and to answer questions about modules, theming and customization.