pneu*mat*ic (adjective) 
1 : of, relating to, or using gas (as air or wind): 
     a : moved or worked by air pressure 
     b (1) : adapted for holding or inflated with compressed air 
        (2) : having air-filled cavities 
2 : of or relating to the pneuma. spiritual 
3 : having a well-proportioned feminine figure; especially : having a full bust 
fe*tish (noun)
1 a : an object of irrational reverence or obsessive devotion 
b : an object or bodily part whose real or fantasied presence 
is psychologically necessary for sexual gratification and that is 
an object of fixation to the extent that it may interfere with 
complete sexual expression
2 : a rite or cult of fetish worshipers

On Galleries

When I first set out on building this site, I'd resolved that I'd go with a native Drupal solution. But I kept running into the same problems: Any given solution had most of the features that I wanted, but was missing a few. The one that came closest to a complete solution was Acidfree, but near as I can tell it's currently unsupported, and the dev release hasn't been updated in over a year.

So I went with Menalto Gallery.

Troubleshooting

Keywords:

It's really rather amusing what can go wrong with a web site. Spent much of today tracking down a couple of rather obscure issues, one having to do with the Apache Solr PHP client (perils of using beta software) and the other having to do with a misbehaving DNS server. That one's hacked around for now, still down know what caused it.

Thematic issues

It seems that quite a few changes have been made in Drupal's theming system. I've got most of the version 5 theme ported to version six, but the code I used to format the taxonomy list is broken. I've tracked down a semi-replacement, but it's not quite what I want. Feh.

Massive Upgrade

Okay, so something unexpected happened. The main module that was holding me back from building the site in Drupal 6 rather than Drupal 5 upgrades. Acidfree now has an updated version. So I've upgraded the site. It went fairly smoothly. The only downside is that the Content Recommendation Engine is still at version 5, although an update is allegedly in the works. I'm willing to wait for it.

Turbo Boost

APC caching is installed. The difference in performance is barely noticeable, but it's there. It'll make a lot more impact when the site actually has more than one user on it.

Also took the opportunity to do some database cache tuning. Again, I'll have to revisit once there's some traffic load on. But it's good practice.

And now, 5.3

Yet another minor version update. This one was painless, not even any database updates.

I'm mildly disheartened that Drupal 6 is already in beta and I haven't launched on 5 yet. Although I know it's not that big a deal. When I started on this and 5 was in beta, it took a long time for the modules to catch up. If I switched to 6 now, it would be another year to get to where I am now, and that wouldn't be good.

Accessibility

Alright, getting back on track.

Tested out the Taxonomy Access Control module. It's probably much more useful for sites that want finer grained control, but I had trouble getting it to do what I wanted. I almost got there, but was thwarted by a problem that turned out to be not at all TAC's fault.

Note to Drupal admins: a role must have the "View uploaded files" permission enabled in order to be able to see pictures if you're using the private file storage method..

Rollin' in my 5.2

Upgrade Drupal to version 5.2.

Security updates, plus an update that should make the Chatroom module work.

Mass Effect

Finally got out the last of the kinks that were preventing me from using Acidfree and the Links module.

The Links module wasn't building several of the required tables. Still don't' know why. Building them manually makes things work, and now that it's installed it shouldn't' be a problem.

More importantly, I've got mass importing working for Acidfree. Really, the main thing it has going for it over the regular image import is recursiveness. I won't have to import each subdirectory individually. That will be quite spiffy.

Capitulation

A while back, I got tired of wrestling with PostgreSQL. Maybe someday, when the module support is better, I'll go back to it. But, after dedicating an evening to working out the kinks and peculiarities, I managed to hack a solution that got the work I'd done so far out of PostreSQL and into a MySQL database.

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