OddThinking

Which requirements does Acquia Drupal meet?

Installation and Configuration

Acquia Drupal 6.6 is both much, much easier to set-up than Drupal 5.0, and very difficult to set-up.

The installation was painless. It was the configuration that was difficult.

The sheer quantity of modules and flexibility of the system made it difficult to know where to start, and where to look.

Throw in a few bugs, and the process becomes very daunting.

However, perhaps because of the experience I had with Drupal in the past, I didn’t find it overwhelming. At each challenge, I had the feeling that this was possible to fix – I just needed to search the entire dungeon until I found out how.

I haven’t documented every challenge I encountered and then solved. This summary is too long as it is.

Registration

My plan was to not register with Acquia for support. I was just going to leech of their open-source distribution. The tool doesn’t like you doing that, and forces you to register with nag boxes that appear on the live site. They do offer a free license for small sites (with very limited support options, which is only fair.) Registration was unnecessarily difficult with key information well hidden.

I am uncomfortable that, even though it is free, I am locked in with Acquia. When Acquia folds in the Dot Com Crash 2.0, and my current license expires, how much development will I need to do to unhook their nagware? It is less than the effort I would need to do with a third-party host, so I guess I can’t complain too much. It just devalues the level of open-sourcedness I was expecting.

Bugs

I did encounter some bugs:

Image Sizes

The first time I uploaded an image, it failed to create a thumbnail (with an exception) because the image was too big. I tried with another image. This time it gave a nice error message that the 1.17MB image was larger than the 800KB limit, and the photo couldn’t be accepted. The next line reported that the image was successfully created. So much for checking error codes!

Did I mention that Drupal was feature-rich and had lots of options? The 800 KB limit was configurable, so I changed it to 1 GB. The image processing module was selectable. I changed from GD2 to ImageMagick in the hope it did better memory-handling. After that, I didn’t see the problem recurr.

Missing Settings Page

Another problem occurred with its bulk upload feature. (Generally, these work by ftping many images to a specific directory, then pointing the gallery software to that directory.) Drupal reported that the bulk upload module it hadn’t been configured with a directory path, which was true. However, the bulk upload module failed to make its setting page available, so I couldn’t configure it. (The link that pointed to the settings page was broken.)

Investigating further, I found that the bulk upload module’s is called “Image Import 6.x-1.0-alpha3”. The 6.x refers to the Drupal version. This is an alpha release of a module. In fact, five of the image-related modules were alpha versions (and two more were betas). Yet they are included with a production version of Acquia?

Isn’t the very reason that I am leeching of Acquia’s hard-work is that they have taken steps to ensure there are no dodgy modules that can’t even be started on a clean install of a carefully eco-system of modules. That left a sour taste in my mouth. Acquia is going to have to do better than that, if they want to keep leeches like me around!

Successes

To be fair, the bits of Drupal that did work generally seemed to work very well.

I liked that I could separate the tags associated with people from the tags associated with activities, locations, stage names etc.

Need More Work

The display of the tags as one long list may need some work. For example, I was able to create a field to specify who the photographer was, but only by creating a new tag type, Photographer, with values like “[Photo Credit: Bob]”, and then telling Drupal to sort them Photographers last in the tag list.

I could group galleries as a tree, but I couldn’t get the menu to display them as an (expanded) tree, to make selection easier.

When selecting to show all images with a tag, it could display some set text (which is great; I can reference other sites with photos of that person.) However, the photos were then displayed as a list of images, rather than as a gallery, which means it was a long vertical list, on thumbnail per row.

The big surprise was that, when I had an image open, I couldn’t advance forward or backward to the next image in the sequence (whatever that sequence may be). That is a critical requirement, and one of the key missing features in my custom software site. It is impossible for me to rule out that it was merely one configuration setting, or one new module installation away, but I couldn’t see how it would be done.

Summary

I think I have seen a big jump forward in Drupal. As a CMS, it remains as one of the first I would grab for a new, moderately complex site. However, I am afraid it isn’t there yet for photo galleries.