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.

A long time ago, when the web was young, to run a personal web site you needed to edit every individual page. This was done either directly in the language of the web page (html) or using a wysiwyg editor. These pages needed individually uploading to the web server, and the links between them needed manually maintaining.

The blog came about to make this easier for quickly posting new entries. The main features of a blog are themed pages, on-web editing, a front page listing recent posts and a detailed page holding a more complete entry.

Most systems support comments, image posting, rss feeds and lots of other goodies under the hood.

Wordpress is the mot popular and can do most things out of the box. Drupal is another system I use, which can be configured as a blog, amongst other things.

Wordpress is a top-notch blogging engine. It is very good, especially to get a site up and running quickly. My family all use Wordpress blogs, and I am unlikely to get them to change.

It is easy to theme, but is manifestly a blog engine. People bend it into a CMS on a regular basis, but it all looks like too much work for any sane person.

I got bored by the old layout, so have carried out a bit of a makeover on this site. I found a theme that I like the look of, and then hammered back into it all the customisations that I wanted to keep from the old layout. In this day and age of high resolution screens, while there are still a lot of people that prefer big text, I felt I really needed a “liquid” layout. If you resize your browser you will see the page relayout dynamically, cool.

While I was doing this, my mother decided she wanted her site madeover, so I ended up doing that, too. Now Alison and Tiffany are getting on the scene, so I think I’ll have plenty more site hacking to do.

I have finished migrating back to Wordpress now.

Why? Because I am not actively doing any Drupal work at present, so it seemed a big overhead maintaining Drupal blogs along with my families Wordpress blogs. The anti-spam technology was different for both, and both needed upgrading regularly, plus there are always advisories to patch. Now I only have to worry about one set of technology. Also, I wasn’t doing anything particularly special in my blogs that Wordpress couldn’t do anyway.

But, why not move the other blogs to Drupal? Because, all said and done, Drupal is much less end-user friendly and the people writing in those blogs have more to worry about than playing with fancy CMS tools.

I am currently moving the website back to Wordpress. As a result some things may be broken.

Known issues…..

1. None of my links are yet set up
2. The sidebar doesn’t have tag clouds, or much else!
3. The theme is missing a couple of bits and bobs
4. Dates are in American
5. Feedburner probably isn’t working

I have been running a home grown, low key journal for years using a bit of PHP and MySQL. But now I’ve moved to mainstream blog software WordPress I have started to discover many little features such as in link monitoring, RSS and Atom feeds, pinging monitor sites, searching on Technorati.

Using these tools I have discovered another WordPress blogger just starting out on the Paul McKenna “I can make you thin” book and CD – inblognito. I like the categorisation, and may adopt a similar technique here. Good luck.