My main concern is that I've been involved in automotive communities and the online community building scene for 5 years, and I've not yet heard of Drupaul. It's good to hear that DebianPlanet in particular uses it, but I'm still not fully convinced. I'd like to check out more automotive sites that are familiar with it. I would think PostNuke might be a more natural choice if we're going for integration with a pre-existing open-source CMS?

I understand the implications of scratch-coding, but I still see it as the leading choice for us. Photo-journal software is very basic PHP/MySQL stuff, it can be written in a weekend. The actual core coding of this project should be quite simple. The integration aspects would be more challenging, of course.

We could do the alpha in-house, and then a small beta test. In the process, we could actively involve automotive webmasters in the development process. We'll certainly have more to deal with than if we use a pre-existing solution, but we will get all of the bonuses of knowing that we built it ourselves.