The WGBH.org Development Blog

Much like after the holiday season, I’m mired in the post-Drupalcon blues. I feel tired, lethargic, gassy - no, wait, I’m sorry, that’s probably just from the Chinese food I just ate.

Last week at Drupalcon they held a case-study on the Popular Science web site which, don’t you know, was just rebuilt and relaunched using Drupal. I didn’t attend the session but one of our developers, Josh, sure as heckfire did. He was quite impressed with the job they did.

Luckily, the case-study has now been published on the Drupal web site. It’s very interesting, indeed, and details all of the fine work done by the folks at pingVision to make the site a reality.

One aspect that caught my eye was the way they made use of ImageField module for image uploads, and the Drupal Markup Engine (which I’d never heard of) to allow site editors lots of flexibility in content placement on node pages. I will have to give that a gander.

We had considered using the ImageField module for adding images to content types. However, we rejected that idea because we want our editors to have the ability to add images to content nodes (e.g. articles, TV programs, etc.) - or find existing images for reuse - in the simplest way possible. Creating nodes with image fields and relating them to other nodes via node reference doesn’t seem like the best way to do this, as it forces you to select from a drop-down list to choose an existing image. Unless, of course, I’m missing something (which is always possible).

Instead, we’re planning on making use of the Image Assist module, which offers a way to search for and choose existing images or upload new ones and add them inline in the least painful way. I have not yet seen a good case study of a Drupal site that puts much emphasis on being able to find and reuse images when there are potentially lots of images already in the system.

Needless to say, if any of you jokers out there have any insight or suggestions here, please, for the love of Pete, speak up.

Oh yeah, and it looks like we’re going to plow ahead and make the leap to Drupal 6 now, rather than build on Drupal 5 and upgrade after. More on that later…