¶ Image Module Used A Lot, Imagefield Not Even Listed

Image (And File Handling) In Drupal 6 And Beyond

In the beginning (2002), there was Image, and everyone could create images as nodes and all was good, if a bit simplistic. (There was even IPTC and EXIF metadata support). After a little bit of time, you could even attach images to nodes. By 2006, images could be attached to nodes. (By now, Flexinode had been around for a while and CCK had been around for a bit, too.) CCK became the predominant way of creating content types, as opposed to writing a new module for each individual content type. ImageField, a CCK add-on, (released in July 2006) allowed images to be handled by CCK. This, combined with other CCK fields let you do all sorts of neat things like set up an online store with one field being the name of the object your are selling, another field being the description and another three or four fields for uploading images of the product. Or you could be an online newspaper and have anywhere from zero to several images per article. Each page (whether online store or newspaper) could be themed to layout the information appropriately with ImageCache creating derivative (read: resized and/or cropped) images.

Fast forward to 2008 and there's primarily two ways to get images in your Drupal site, with Lullabot's Image vs. ImageField and ImageCache being the definitive comparison between the two. If you were fine with images as nodes and had simple needs (gallery, photoblog, etc.) you probably went with (or continued using from back in 2002) Image. On the other hand, if you were creating tons of content types thanks to CCK, you probably jumped ship to ImageField.

Now, there's talk about merging Image with ImageField (and ImageCache), with a script to migrate from Image to ImageField. But it was also pointed out that one field to handle all uploaded files, images or not, should be the way to go and that this would be the end of ImageField. FileField, combined with FileField Image would handle everyone's imge handling needs (as well as other file types as well).

While some people think images need special handling (and they are right to a degree and FileField Image takes care of this) there is also the consideration that other file types need special handling, such as videos. Just like images have a need for derivative images, so do videos (original high resolution, low resolution, stored as a flash file and a thumbnail screencap to display in the page). Having one unified way of uploading files would mean less code to maintain and there might even be a reasonable chance of getting file (and potentially image) handling in core, the CCK way.

(For these reasons, I've decided to postpone a D6 release of MAQUM.)

Giving Up On A MAMP Stack

I've given up on trying to get a MAMP stack on my local Mac Pro. As beefy as machine as it is, it's not Linux. First, apache didn't work out of the box on OS X. Then, while working on image module, I found out that OS X's PHP doesn't come with GD. (I won't even mention my issues with ruby.)

So I'm going to spend more money on proprietary software (VirtualBox didn't work), most likely VMWare's Fusion so I can run a virtualized instance (or three) of Linux locally. It will take less time, behave the way I expect it to and be a breeze to update, thanks to apt.

¶ Drupal 6.0 Released

¶ Image Module Now Creates Galleries Using Views