What do we need?

We will begin with a fresh Drupal 6 installation, to avoid side effects with already installed modules (e.g. image module).

First, we need the book module! “What, the book module?”, you might think. Yes, the book module is very useful for this: The image gallery will become the main book page and the images will become the pages of this book. Also the book module will provide a nice menu structure and a navigation system.

Next, we need BookMadeSimple (at least Version 6.x-2.0), a module that makes book handling more easy. In the book module, for example, you can only globally define the types of subpages. With BookMadeSimple you can automatically create a main book when creating a node and restrict the types of child nodes per parent node type. Currently the most current version is not available at drupal.org :( but here: http://code.google.com/p/mmr-drupal-modules/wiki/BookMadeSimple.

Also the Token module is needed. We will see later.

Of course we need CCK! The content construction kit is the swiss knife within Drupal. With CCK we will define our needed node types. No Drupal site without CCK!

To create image nodes, we need ImageCache, ImageAPI, FileField, FileField token and ImageField. These CCK companion modules will enable us to achieve the desired image storage.

As we use the book module to create the image gallery, we do not only want the menu titles of the subpages at the bottom. But we want to create a list of thumbnail images at the bottom of the gallery body. So we need Views and ViewField.

Download all modules in the current official released version. If there is only a dev-release, use this.