Blogs

So I just made a formal announcement of the pending publication of Drupal Multimedia to Drupal.org, which was promoted to the front page of d.o!

What a fun and nerve-wracking task that was. Trying to distill several months of work into a small list. Tweaking every word to make sure it's right. Then even in the end, realizing I'd made the post in third person, but left my signature in first.

But this is nothing compared to the book! We've just started the editing process, and it's really great, seeing the words from the first chapter I wrote months ago, and having to face the reality of their obsolescence. I knew taking on the project that I wanted to write the book for Drupal 6, which didn't even exist at the time. So the first half of the book was speculative in a very real sense; few of us knew in October what merlinofchaos had planned for Views 2!

That's what the editing process is for though. We're making sure the book is relevant for Drupal 6. (And I'm trying to keep in the necessary parts to ensure it's still useful for those still using Drupal 5, even if those are relegated to hint and tip boxes.)

It's amazing how far Drupal has come over the years. That we can devote an entire book to integrating multimedia into Drupal is a testament to that. When the book is finally in your hands, I hope reading it will be as helpful for your continued learning as writing it has been for mine.

Though my next book might simply be a blog...

Embedded Media Field has grown exponentially in the last year since I've begun developing it. From its humble beginnings as a brainstorming session at DrupalCampNYC last spring, it has grown from a quirky method of make embedding YouTube videos easier for editors to a full-featured suite of modules allowing for drag-and-drop placement of third party videos, images, and audio clips.

Used on a wide range of sites, such as Air America, NRDC, and Drupal Dojo, the module is a flexible and powerful solution for embedding multimedia.

Read on for its strengths and weaknesses...

As referred to in YouTube API for Drupal on the Way, beeradb has now opened the YouTube API module for development. He and I have been working to polish it up and make it ready for release.

You can take a look at the YouTube search on this site if you want to try it out! You can currently search YouTube for tags or users from the form, and see the results right here.

Obviously, that's just the tip of the iceberg. There are some cool things planned for it in the near term, such as integration with Media Mover, Embedded Media Field, and yes, Rob, I haven't forgotten about Annotation Field...

And of course, the holy grail of single site integration of a YouTube video upload from your browser...

On IRC, Károly Négyesi (better known as chx) asked me about the status of the Drupal FTP project. He was concerned that it stores FTP usernames and passwords, which could open up the possibility for security holes and malware if extended or used improperly. Additionally, one of its stated goals was as a possible means to automatically download and install modules on one's site, which is also a stated goal for the Plugin Manager Summer of Code project.

At first, I said that I would remove the project entirely, as I hadn't worked on it in over a year, and had no intention of continuing development in the near future. Even at that time, although I saw the possibility for using it to install modules on your site, I wasn't really that interested in pursuing that aspect, as I really didn't want to get into the security issues involved.

However, I decided to post to the Developer's list first, to get further feedback before removing the project. I had had a few queries regarding the project over the past year, and suspected that there might be some developers actually using it. Additionally, I wanted to find out if there were any compelling reasons to actually keep the module in the project repository.

Turns out to have been a good thing, it looks like. Not only are there a few people actually using the module, I was reminded of other efforts to use FTP with Drupal, most notably Media Mover and, of course, the upcoming Plugin Manager module.

Read on...

I just read We don't need no Pagination, which describes a technique to replace the read more of a page with an automatic page loader for the next section. I think this could easily be done in Drupal, maybe as a plug-in for Views and teasers.

As a start, I could easily envision teasers automatically loading the rest of the content on mouse hover. Or a page view loading the next batch of results when scrolled to the bottom. Probably other uses as well, although they might be more theme/site specific.

Is there already something that does this? If not, I'll probably start a new project for it. Maybe something like Automatic Page Loader or something...