{"id":863,"date":"2008-12-05T10:12:37","date_gmt":"2008-12-04T23:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=863"},"modified":"2008-12-05T10:12:37","modified_gmt":"2008-12-04T23:12:37","slug":"online-photo-db-drupal-mini-evaluation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2008\/12\/05\/online-photo-db-drupal-mini-evaluation\/","title":{"rendered":"Online Photo DB: Drupal mini-evaluation"},"content":{"rendered":"
This post is part of the Online Photo Database project documentation<\/a>. Learn more about the project’s current status<\/a>.<\/div>\n

Evaluating Drupal<\/a>‘s readiness<\/a> to become the CMS behind an online photo database<\/a> is not a trivial task.<\/p>\n

You’ve heard this story before: it was exactly the same with the WordPress mini-evaluation<\/a>. Drupal is so configurable, and has such a large set of plugins, that it is difficult to assert that it can’t<\/em> meet a requirement – it may be that it just hasn’t got the right plugins (Drupal calls them ‘modules’.) or hasn’t been configured correctly.<\/p>\n

I mentioned before<\/a> that Drupal scares me more than WordPress, from a familiarity perspective.<\/p>\n

I’ve been running this site on WordPress for 3 \/12 years, I have built several blog installations from scratch, and I have written several WordPress plugins, so I am familiar with the WordPress way.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, with Drupal, I have made one installation, and it was a constant battle, surfing on the edge of abandoning it. That may sound like a mixed metaphor, but that’s exactly how it felt. Installation was tricky. Configuration was very tricky. Choosing modules was a crap-shoot. The critical bugs (like not letting the admin login) appeared only intermittently, and there was the constant fear that they were caused by my poor configuration skills.<\/p>\n

In Drupal’s defence, that was version 5.0.x. I later upgraded to 5.1, the bugs disappeared, the clouds cleared away to reveal the sun.<\/p>\n

For those following along, that meant it was still a constant battle, and I was still surfing on the edge of abandoning it, but now I was surfing in the sun!<\/p>\n

These days, Drupal is up to version 6.6, and 7.0 is in the works. Maybe all those issues have been addressed? Nonetheless, I wasn’t looking forward to finding out.<\/p>\n

I was particularly concerned because I had heard, from several sources, that Drupal is (or at least, was) below par when it came to image handling.<\/p>\n

I needed to do a mini-evaluation of Drupal modules.<\/p>\n

Then a comment from David<\/a> set me straight.<\/p>\n

A company called Acquia<\/a> have been doing for Drupal what Red Hat did for Linux. They have taken a stack of the best Drupal modules, that work together, packaged them up, and offered them for free, but charge for optional support. <\/p>\n

Amongst the modules they include is an Image Gallery.<\/p>\n

I decided that I was more than happy to outsource my mini-evaluation to Acquia. I will test Drupal using the Acquia-selected Image Gallery module.<\/p>\n

If it turns out I need some other (not blessed by Acquia) modules later to round-out the site, they can still be added.<\/p>\n

Next up, a full evaluation of Acquia Drupal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Evaluating Drupal<\/a>‘s readiness<\/a> to become the CMS behind an online photo database<\/a> is not a trivial task.<\/p>\n

Here’s how I out-sourced part of the job.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[285,47],"tags":[317,284,48,376],"class_list":["post-863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-photography-geek","category-review","tag-drupal","tag-online-photo-database","tag-photography","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=863"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":864,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/863\/revisions\/864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}