Spent a lot more time with drupal - and I would need even more!

It seems like it has taken me forever to complete the assignments for Week 5. Not only did I attend the Biodiversity Informatics Workshop in Nairobi right as Week 5 was starting, but I also got sick on the way back from Nairobi and had a very unproductive week getting checked out. I'm almost back to full speed, but this week's installations and learning curve for all the settings that go with the installations has left me somewhat dazed, confused and stressed about trying to take it all in.

My overall impression is that drupal is very useful, but takes quite a bit of time and expertise to run well. It does not seem like a completely natural fit for a digital collection of photos, video and various text formats. It can be made to work for that, but since I haven't spent a lot of time working with it, my intuition would be to continue to search for other solutions that might be a more natural fit. On the other, hand, I would also want to do some research into the popularity of drupal compared to other solutions and also see how big and active the user communities are for an assortment of content management systems out there right now.

One example of where I'm at with drupal involves the installation of the lightbox2 module. It was certainly easy to install. I had no problem just basically downloading it and moving it to the modules folder in drupal. On the other hand, even though lightbox2 is installed and apparently running quite nicely, in order to actually use it, I need to modify some html for the links to images. I did a quick search in the drupal.org site and could not find any examples of how to do this. There are so many moving parts to drupal that I can't seem to determine where I would start looking for a way to add snippets of html to image links. So, I'm stuck for the time being. It would be nice to have better documentation for this kind of thing, but since the lightbox2 module is basically free, with the developer requesting some financial support to keep developing it, I don't expect to get support that way. Perhaps if I were better integrated into the drupal community, I would know where to turn.

So, I'm glad that I have spent so much time with drupal the past few weeks, but I'm also going to be interested in seeing what else is out there - I saw something about DSpace, I think. It should be interesting!