This year I took the plunge and updated most of my websites to Drupal, an open source content management system (CMS) in an attempt to make them easier to manage and update - the idea being that easy updates would prompt me to actually update them. A main website which has had minimal changes in 4-5 years doesn't look good...

As with any CMS-driven site, most of the work takes place in the setup - once that's done the rest is pretty easy, adding new content via online forms, much like the Movable Type engine that runs the Inside Aperture site. Drupal has a core set of functionality, plus you can download and install a whole series of different modules from different authors to add new features such as forums, random image blocks, advanced commenting etc.

Setting up to be able to add individual pages was pretty easy, but of course as users of Aperture we want to be able to upload entire galleries at once, complete with all out wonderful metadata. Drupal will easily let you add multiple images at once simply by uploading them to a specific folder on your server, but you don't get any of your metadata that way.

Aperture Assistant and a module called Node Import to the rescue! The Node Import module allows you to upload CSV (comma-separated values) & TSV (tab-separated values) files, creating a new 'node' or page for each line with each item of the line being mapped to things like the page title, body text etc.
To create the TSV file I created an Aperture Assistant workflow that would grab the version name, title (a custom tag of my own), caption and keywords for all selected images. These are then exported to the TSV file and saved on the HD. I then go to the 'import content' page on my website, point it towards the TSV file and then go through a few steps where Drupal asks how to map the different columns in the file, for instance:

• The Version Name becomes the name of the file(s) that my custom media template uses.


• The Title becomes the page title.


• The IPTC caption becomes the body text for the page.


• The keywords (separated by a '|' character) get added to the site's database of image keywords, and are added to the bottom right of the page.

The Aperture Assistant workflow also exports JPEG copies of the different images, ready to be uploaded to the site via FTP.

There are more steps involved with this than using an export plug-in such as the one for SmugMug etc, on the other hand it's my own site and I get full control. ;-) And select, run workflow, upload images, import TSV file isn't too bad when you do it once per gallery.

Ian

P.S. Like Micah, I like to play around with timelapse photography and here are a couple of recent examples. Incidentally, both those pages were added to the site by the method described above, including the 'timelapse' keyword.