OddThinking

Evaluating Drupal‘s readiness to become the CMS behind an online photo database is not a trivial task.

You’ve heard this story before: it was exactly the same with the WordPress mini-evaluation. Drupal is so configurable, and has such a large set of plugins, that it is difficult to assert that it can’t 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.

I mentioned before that Drupal scares me more than WordPress, from a familiarity perspective.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I needed to do a mini-evaluation of Drupal modules.

Then a comment from David set me straight.

A company called Acquia 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.

Amongst the modules they include is an Image Gallery.

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.

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

Next up, a full evaluation of Acquia Drupal.