This site is now running on Drupal 6. It was a useful exercise in finding out how much pain there would be to upgrade some of my customers sites.

The good news is that it is relatively straight-forward. But, unfortunately, contributors are being a bit slow at getting on-board with Drupal 6. This site uses a custom theme, and about 8 contributed modules.

I think it is time for Gallery to be retired from this blog. I will still keep it for Alison and Mum, but I am actively looking for alternatives for my photos. SmugMug is very nice, and looks like a good candidate.

So why? Well, although Gallery is a nice piece of software, I am getting seriously pissed off the the Drupal and Wordpress integration is ALWAYS the bit that breaks when I upgrade anything. This week I upgraded Alison to the latest Wordpress and WPG2 and her blog threw errors on every attempt to view a page only when she logged in. It was fine for me, and for non-logged in users. I traced the fault to a problem with G2’s embedded user mapping.

Next, I am working on porting this site to Drupal 6 – I do quite a bit of Drupal freelancing, and want to get up to speed with how Drupal 6 differs. My own site is good motivation to learn. But, how about Gallery integration. Oh good, there is a dev release. Oh bad, it requires Gallery 2 V2.3, which isn’t even released yet. WTF. So, the guys working on this (for nothing, I understand) think it makes sense to write the code to integrate a released Drupal 6 to an unreleased Gallery 2! I note, that ALMOST everything else is working for Drupal 6. There are some settling down issues with quite a few modules, the most inexplicable being XMLSitemap, but at least it works.

So, I think, what is it that wastes HUGE lumps of time every time I do an upgrade (and for my family, I have 6 sites). Gallery2, every time.

So, what do you think I can use as a replacement for other family members? It needs easy steps for linking a photo into Wordpress, other than that, just easy to use.

Gallery2 is a highly featured web gallery. I use it across my web-sites here, embedded in both WordPress and Drupal.

It is a complex system, with a very abstracted implementation which is hard to fully understand. Out of the self-hosted galleries it is probably the most suitable for me, but I am oft-tempted to move away from it – Flickr seems tempting, but by the time I bought the features I need, and multiplied that by the number of users using my Gallery it is no longer quite so attractive.