Most who know me know I like to take on Big, Scary, Projects and make them work. But, I don’t go in with a blueprint and a chizel, I typically go in with a bottle of whiskey, a stubborn attitude, best intentions and a sledgehammer.
My latest baby is Media. The Multimedia solution for Drupal 7.
I’ll spare you the history, because it is quite long and involved. It can all be read on the product page. It is numerous heroes specing, designing, factoring, refactoring, re-refactoring. It is the shoulders of giants like emfield, styles, field API, asset, wysiwyg and image_assist. And it is the ongoing support of companies like Acquia and Advomatic.
My ideas are simple though:
- You never have to upload twice. Whenever you need a file, and it’s already on your system, you should be able to re-use it.
- Files have feelings too :) They have meta-data, they should have fields. MP3s have genres, images have captions. Make them 1st class entities.
- The Internet is full of media. You should be able to use a flickr image, a youtube video and an uploaded image in the same gallery and with the same interface.
- Media belongs *everywhere*. You should be able to embed media in any text area on Drupal
- Media is for everyone. Make it safe and easy for any users (even anonymous ones) to upload, select, and reference media in their content.
- A picture says a thousands words. I want one of those words to be Sexy. A nice API is great, but we also want this to look great. We want people to hand media to their clients and watch their jaw drop with a zero-training-required solution.
You can see the project page for the status of various features in this goal.
The latest demo (below) shows the new media_gallery module which I’ve been developing. This will provide a way to create collections of media objects and give them descriptions.
It also shows off how media works as a field, and can be attached to anything fieldable in Drupal 7. Link to video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sqyh-TQKAQI
Originally published at http://www.jacobsingh.name on March 15, 2010.
