Anyone use Drupal?

[Deckerd]

I'm interested in finding out whether this is worth exploring. Is it really usable by an innumerate technophobe?

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Drupal is very powerful and has a lot of crazy shit under the hood. Can be very daunting for the technically disinclined. I would much more readily suggest something like WordPress for you. It is very, very easy to set up and use.

 

[Deckerd]

You're my kinda guy. You understand clueless twerps and are kind to them.

My boss want me to offer to set up a photograph retrieval system for a bunch of teachers whose technical knowhow is even less than mine. I was minded to suggest something webby.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Well, having used Drupal a lot, you would have to disable quite a few features to make it less intimidating for novices. WordPress is in "less intimidating mode" by default.

That said, Drupal has a ton more extensions available that do damn near anything, including the photograph thing. Are we talking about, essentially, a web photo gallery that people can upload pictures to?

 

[Deckerd]

Well, having used Drupal a lot, you would have to disable quite a few features to make it less intimidating for novices. WordPress is in "less intimidating mode" by default.

That said, Drupal has a ton more extensions available that do damn near anything, including the photograph thing. Are we talking about, essentially, a web photo gallery that people can upload pictures to?

Both uploading new material and to retrieve in an organised manner. All their stuff is on various hard drives, flash drives, hard copy (FFS) and even still in cameras. They need it for assessment and monitoring purposes, so the boss's job is to put meaningful labels on them first of all.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Drupal can do that quite easily. You'd take a vanilla installation, add CCK, ImageField, and ImageCache modules, and use the taxonomy system to categorize them. The Views module could be used to produce the galleries themselves. You could also go with the Gallery2 integration module, but I think the CCK solution is more flexible (given that you can add any fields you want to it.)

Here you can find information on how WordPress supports photo galleries. It also has Gallery2 integration available.

 

[Deckerd]

You're a star. You realise I'll just cut and paste that explanation, take it along to the meeting tomorrow and they'll think I know what I'm talking about? If we get the gig I'll just bribe you with blandishments, hookers and blow.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

Glad to be of service. Hookers and blow are always acceptable compensation.

 

[Deckerd]

I'm using a bog standard iMac for my server. Would Wordpress run on that alright? It's already got MySQL on there as well as Apache (obviously).

 

[Robert Maxwell]

You'll need PHP installed, too. If you have all that I'd say you should be fine no matter what solution you want to use.

 

[Unicron]

"Drupal" sounds like a brand of cough syrup or something.