Drupal

Drupal is a good entry point for a novice to begin to create web content. Configuration of the site, adding  content and creating users has been relatively easy. But I am less than impressed with it for managing a repository of photographs.

I’m disappointed in the appearance of my Drupal collection.  I’m not talking about the lack of fancy graphics, colors or themes for the website, but the absence of the appearance of an organized structure to the repository. It’s true I have not spent a lot of time configuring it, so perhaps this is just an “out-of-the-box” experience.  But I don’t like the items in the collection to be displayed as posts. I don’t like that an image is not displayed until one clicks on it as an “attachment” -- this gives the impression that viewing the images is the secondary reason to come to the site. I don’t like that the information I entered for the record is not displayed with field names, but just as (meaningless) words in a semi-structured paragraph.  I don’t like that I cannot give an order to multiple words in the Subject field—they are listed in alphabetical order, not order of importance to the contents of the photograph. Probably in the hands of someone who was familiar with Drupal, all these negatives could be finessed into a beautiful, meaningful display, but not for a Drupal beginner like me with limited time to spend on each part of the assignment.  It is not surprising to me that a number of repositories (like AMP, IUPUI, University of Louisville and others) are using a commercial application such as ContentDM.