Emacs keybinding not working in custom major mode

I'm in the early stages of creating a major mode for Emacs for browsing and interacting with the Stack Exchange Network.

Involved in it are several major modes, all with one-key keybindings similar to dired. I looked at the source for dired, and extracted what I thought would work:

(defvar stack-network-mode-map
  (let ((map (make-keymap)))
    (define-key map "n"     'stack-network-next-site)
    (define-key map "p"     'stack-network-previous-site)
    (define-key map ","     'stack-network-move-site-up)
    (define-key map "."     'stack-network-move-site-down)
    (define-key map "j"     'stack-network-jump-to-bookmarks)
    (define-key map "\C-m"  'stack-network-do-enter-site) ; ret
    (define-key map "o"     'stack-network-do-enter-site)
    (define-key map "u"     'stack-network-do-profile-summary)
    (define-key map "\C-uu" 'stack-network-do-profile-summary-for-user)
    (define-key map "i"     'stack-network-do-inbox)
    (define-key map "b"     'stack-network-toggle-bookmark)
    (define-key map "?"     'stack-network-list-functions) ; [1]
    (define-key map "\C-i"  'stack-network-display-details) ; tab
    map)
  "Keymap for Stack Exchange: Network Browser major mode")

but unfortunately this seems to have absolutely no effect; the buffer is simply edited just as any other normal buffer would be. How can I achieve single-key keybindings if this isn't they way? (Which, by the way, I'm sure it is. There has to be something else going on here.)

Solution

You want to define stack-network-mode using define-derived-mode (and make it derive from special-mode, for example).

Other comments about your code:

use () rather than nil for empty argument lists.
stack-network-next-site needs to have (interactive) right after the docstring to make it an interactive command otherwise it won't work as a key-binding.

If you don't want to use special-mode, you can call supress-keymap right after creating your make-keymap.