Pour into Drupal

I have a friend who has an old Oldsmobile 88, from the mid 50s. He'd be out there every evening, in the garage, tuning it, polishing it, just fooling with it. It never worked totally right. Drupal is like that for me. I'm tweaking it and looking for fixes to correct those messages with the pinkish background. It works but has its problems. OK, I've only been at it for six days or so and have been able to enter content and metadata. It is searchable. It works. My friend was able to drive around in his Olds but it was soon back in the garage for more tweaking and tuning.

Drupal is open source and there are many people contributing various modules (code) to add to the functionality. There are modules a plenty, for almost anything you might want to add. As a class (see previous entries) we added a number of modules to the Drupal core) including an image module and a WYSIWYG editor, both working well and a category browser which for me never worked, evidently, there is a reported bug. With the image module, I was surprised to find it only supports jpeg, gif and png files in the "attach image module". If you want to add a tiff or a bmp then you need to do it in using the more conventional file attachment.

I added three modules on my own. The first is Lightbox2, a java script which overlay images on a page. It was a method to view photos in my collection. I still haven't gotten it to work to my satisfaction. The second module is Flash Video, a very powerful solution for playing video clips. One of its more interesting features is that it converts the original format to flv so it will be able to be played in a flash player. I've been able to upload an mpg file and have it playback but in QuickTime. Needs some tweaking! The third module, Node Map, is a tool that relates a node to a location on a map using either Yahoo or Google maps. It offers many uses to visitors to my collection, primarily attaching photo to a location. It also has its bugs. When I enter a location into the map I receive a location does not exist message.

I won't be in the garage, instead I'll be at the computer looking for solutions and tweaking.