Tangara Progress

Ive gotten back into the Tangara, as well as spending some time on evaluating web site CMS tools, for a future Redfern Workshopz web site.

First the Tangara. Essentially all I have done this weekend is to finish the floor of the upper deck, including the ceiling and light fittings of the lower deck, and integrated it all into the stairwells, so that I can easily hide the stairs and upper deck while working on the lower deck. Its not a lot of progress since the last report, but it is progress.

The light fittings are also in place for the upper deck, but not complete yet. There is an upper ceiling, but you cant see it in the picture. This angle also shows the work I recently did on the interior portion of the gangway. I started on the gangway exterior, but deleted it again, as I am not quite sure how to implement it. I have an idea for something cool, so Im going to think about it some more, and will probably do that last.

From here the next steps are seating and handrails, and then the interior is just about done (other than texturing). Theres still a few glitches on the exterior that I need to look at, so Im not quite finished with the base model yet.

I have decided to set up a website for Redfern Workshopz. Im a PHP geek, and have my own web server and hosting etc, so thats not a problem. The problem is software. I could write it from scratch, but I really dont want to spend that much time on it. Over the last 5 or so years I have looked at various CMS packages, for various projects, and they have all come up lacking in some area.

Unfortunately, 5 years on, nothing much has changed. The Nuke variants still rely on an undiciplined rag-tag collection of user contributed modules for features that should be standard, and the lack a centralised download site makes it almost impossible to find the module you need. some quite basic CMS features are still completely missing.

Other CMS tools also lack many of the nescessary features. Its not that hard. All I want are the following: News, Blog, Gallery, Downloads, Project Manager (including Issue or bug tracking), Wiki and a Paypal IPN enabled shopping cart, for payware items, if I choose to go in that direction. Of course the ability to add static display pages to show off my creations would be nice too.

Having stumbled on the CMS Matrix, and compared features of various CMS packages (uh... all of them) I finally settled on Drupal, and have spent a bit of time setting up a site to evaluate it. I will still have to write some modules myself, but at least the basic framework is there (partly as user contributed modules) for all of the features I need. Ive found that the latest beta breaks some of the contributed modules, so Im about to start over with the latest stable release, which has wider support.

Current Poly Count: 2460
File Version: 151