I’ve spent the last day or two trying to pick up the Drupal content management system. So far, I can confirm that Drupal is fairly easy to set up, and that the Lullabot Drupal podcasts are really nice. In particular, I liked the one on obsolete Drupal modules, because it gives you a fairly good sense of what to study first. (Not surprisingly, the answer seems to be “CCK and Views”, which is what I’d already heard.)

I decided to try to build a little photo-sharing system, analogous to Flickr. This is, of course, almost as big a waste of time as (ahem) building one’s own blog software, but I figured it would encourage me to figure out how things worked, and would allow me to incorporate my personal killer feature: the ability to have a private photo blog as well as a public one, and to invite certain friends and family members to look at the private photos.

The good news is that there’s a Lullabot page called “How to build Flickr with Drupal” . Awesome! Except, um, the article is a year old and uses techniques (like the Image module) that the very same Lullabot folks now decry as “deprecated”. Not so awesome?

Not to worry. Other helpful users have provided hints on how to use the more modern Imagefield and Imagecache modules to build an image gallery. But my private gallery idea quickly hit a snag: the Imagecache module refuses to work with an access-controlled directory of image files, and the patch isn’t quite ready yet.

The rest of the image upload process isn ‘t very clear, either. Indeed, it turns out that the presence of multiple, incompatible, half-built image modules is a well-known unsolved problem in Drupal, which I just happen to have stepped directly into.

Perhaps I need a different starter project. After all, it turns out that Flickr has already implemented the private photo blog.