Red Leaf Media

With virtually every Drupal site that I build for Red Leaf, I use a few key image-related modules. First, imagefield is used to add image "fields" to various pieces of content. For example, you can have a family photo associated with a directory entry or a related photo for new items. Additionally, the imagecache module takes care of automatically re-sizing and cropping images as needed. For example, if the user uploads a ridiculously large photo, the site will automatically resize the image down to a more manageable size.

These modules are integral parts of many Drupal sites. However, they have not been completely ported over to Drupal 6 at this point and are labeled with "alpha" tags right now. Darrel Opry had done a great job maintaining these modules for the Drupal community, but the time required to maintain the modules seemed to exceed the time that he had available. As such, he recently sent an email to the Drupal development mailing list stating that he was looking for new maintainers to take up the imagefield and imagecache mantles. It appears as though these modules have already been passed on to several well-known Drupal developers. I hope that this change of pace will result in stable, official releases of these modules for Drupal 6 in the near future. I have several sites that I would really like to upgrade that depend heavily on these modules.

Thank you Darryl for your hard work on these modules, and good luck to the new maintainers. I hope to be able to carve away time for creating and testing patches in the near future.