11 May 2011, 13:59

Hi Mike, 

It would be bad for the community if every member decided to distribute a slightly modified version of Mahara instead of contributing to the main source. All information about plugins should appear in some form on the Mahara website. But that doesn't mean that you cannot take the initiative and provide services to the community on your own server. 

Too much centralization induces a resistance to change and a lack of adaptability in a rapidly changing world. On the one hand, this puts great pressure on Catalyst to develop and maintain such a gallery when their time could be better used on Mahara development. On the other hand if you expect everything to be centralized, then you have to wait for them to find the time to develop it... and this means it could well never happen. 

If you are already familiar with Drupal, why not give it a shot? The CCK module let you provide the functionality that you describe - http://drupal.org/project/cck. If it works well, then it wouldn't be much of a challenge to migrate it to the Mahara server.