Here's an idea to develop a free automotive photojournal in PHP/MySQL.
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This is a link to our tech project photo journal at Hotrodders.com: http://www.hotrodders.com/forum/journal.php

It's basic photo-journal software, in PHP and MySQL. Most of it is based on assorted vBJournal code, with various modifications and alterations added over time. It's become one of our best sources of hands-on low-buck automotive tech information.

While there are many other similar pieces of software out there, most of them are not specifically designed to document automotive tech projects.

I think we should develop, as a group, free software that we can distribute among automotive websites to document automotive tech projects.

Although it's fairly simple software, we would need to write it from the ground up. Most journal/blog software that integrates with forums only does so for a specific kind of forum software. We would want to have the journal software use its own php objects, and its own template system. An ideal journal system would include good organization -- a search function, or a sub-journals feature, or both. We would want to integrate it with several different board membership structures (vBulletin, phpBB, IPB, UBB.threads, etc.). We should also make it a little more blog-like: add some RSS functionality, and some direct links to threads for people to discuss each entry. Search engine-friendly URLs should be incorporated somehow.

We could design this software "forum-hack" style, where we allocate a specific forum at CrankshaftCoalition.com to collaborate on it, and offer it for free no-strings-attached download. Or, we could do it in a more open-source manner, with a CVS server, and an open-source license. Either way, it's fairly simple software that could be extremely helpful to many online automotive communities.

If you have suggestions for custom tech photo journal software, or if you'd like to work on this project, please post in this thread.

I can't see the complications involved with implementing a bulletin board and photojournal in free (as in speech) software, so I must be missing something. Is there a list of features that must be implemented, somewhere?

It looks to me as if an entire 'online community' website could be set up using Drupal ( http://drupal.org ). There are a great many 'modules' written for that ( http://drupal.org/project/Modules ). The FOAF module looks interesting in regards to ties between sites, such as hotrodders.com and crankshaftcoalition.com :

I'll put together a list of essential features, that's a good starting point for this project.

I'm not too familiar with Drupal, but I'll give it a good look. Do you know of any automotive sites that are using Drupal?

I don't know anything about any automotive sites, really. When I first started visiting hotrodders.com, I thought that "vB code is ON" meant MS Visual Basic. It had me gritting my teeth over the idea that html was disallowed while vb was allowed.

The coder I mentioned in our discussion on hotrodders is the guy who suggested Drupal to me. His background is mainframes and databases. The only experience I've had with Drupal is when I experimented with it to try to get Groklaw off of Geeklog. They didn't want to change, though, so I dropped the work I was doing with Drupal. (The only reason I was looking for alternatives to Geeklog then was because its limitations kept getting in the way of implementing requests by the site owner).

Are these roughly what the software needs to do:

1. authentication
2. permit and restrict activity based on authentication (banned, guest, registered user, moderator, admin, root)
3. present data as html pages, according to some organizational scheme decided by the site admin (data is retrieved from a database via SQL queries)
4. present forms for adding data to the database (either text, images, or both)
5. permit searching the data

Yup, that's all. Pretty basic, very blog-like.

We can base authentication on the specific forum user table. And, we can read the usergroups in from the forum software, and set permissions based on those.

Data would be presented either as static HTML pages, or live PHP pages. Either way, the pages would have to be properly SEO-able and spider-friendly. This would probably be done with some mod_rewrite rules, but I think there's a way we can do it without having to rely on mod_rewrite.

A simple form for adding entries, a search function, and some RSS-functionality, and we should be good to go.

I've been discussing this with the coder I mentioned.

John Kim: "If the plan is to migrate from vbulletin to drupal then the database schema is already done... The work becomes a matter of moving data from one table to another."

So, how much data can I get to play with? I need a few sample records to try to set up a drupal-based site (offline) to try to mimic the way hotrodders stores, retrieves and presents that data.

I can give you a large chunk of vbulletin data. Let me know what tables you want in the dump file.

But I'm not certain what direction this is taking us. I've been doing some research on drupal -- how will a vb/drupal migration will help us code a basic photojournal to integrate with common forum software for automotive sites?

I hope that "vbulletin data" you mention is not in some format proprietary to vbulletin. If it is, that's a show-stopper, IMO, because it ties everything to vbulletin rather than allowing the creation of a journals section that can be set up alongside, or integrated with, any existing "online community" out there.

The journals default page shows "Latest project journal photos", "Largest project journals", "Latest project journal entries", "Most popular project journals", and a link to a list of all project journals. That suggests there is a summary table that gets updated with each new journal entry. Each journal is a collection of datestamped entries of text and images, so I would need at least a sample of that table.

vBulletin imposes restrictions that interfere with creating a community. It has a tendency to isolate little licensed pockets. If the journals can be presented just as well with Drupal, that eliminates the artificially imposed restrictions and isolation.

Whatever is used to set up Drupal and migrate the data will be freely distributable. It may require no more than a basic installation of Drupal with some "contrib" modules, followed by configuring a theme. It may require writing a new module for Drupal, but then that would be freely distributable among automotive sites (or any others), also. Writing a custom module for automotive photojournals would still be less work, less custom code to maintain, than writing the whole thing from scratch.

Using something as actively maintained and developed as Drupal eliminates the burden of creating and maintaining all of those functions that are common to any online, web-based community. This would allow you to focus only on those functions and features that really are specific to automobile-centric sites. Using Drupal also opens up the opportunity for site admins to use any other features of Drupal and the contributed modules to customize or enhance their journals section.

I know it's going to be more work, but I did intend to code this from scratch, make it integratable with most of the common forum software, and give it away for free.

This is the first I've heard of Drupal, and I'm very hesitant to make this project dependent upon it. If development of Drupal stops, then we would have to re-code everything from scratch. If we build it from scratch to begin with, actively maintain it, and GPL it, we can ensure the future of the code.

Consider my earlier post where I gave an itemized list of functions and asked if that represented, roughly, what you needed. Drupal covers all of those already, and then some. It provides for authentication, multiple (configurable) permission levels, dynamic presentation of the data, adding to the data (posting, with threads), and searching.

It has been under active development since about 2000. That's a good track record for software. Are you familiar with kerneltrap.org ? That runs on Drupal. It uses Drupal in a setting more like the typical news portal, like a typical content management system. Kerneltrap is not insignificant. Neither is DebianPlanet, which also uses Drupal. Something a little closer to the subject at hand: http://www.dirtbike.ws/

If development of Drupal suddenly stopped this instant (I'm having a hard time picturing that, considering how many are using it), the software doesn't disappear and you're not prevented from maintaining it yourself. It already appears to fill the needs. You would still be ahead of any scratch-built project. You would not be depending on untested authentication code, for one example. Everything you code from scratch will be less thoroughly tested than what already exists. Coding from scratch means you're using every site it is implemented on as a guinea pig for alpha code.

[Edited to add:]

You said, "If we build it from scratch, actively maintain it, and GPL it, we can ensure the future of the code." If you base it on Drupal, you can actively maintain it, GPL it, and ensure the future of the code. Drupal is GPL, so it will remain open and free for at least the duration of copyright protection.