Aaron Winborn

MDX 2010 FTW!

With a Drupal Beta planned for May 21, the time is coming for a Media Beta as well! Before we can do that, however, there are a few loose ends to tie up. I've identified two critical pieces for a happy Developer's eXperience (DX) before I'll be happy doing that. There are certainly more: see the Media issue queue for more.

MetaData Handling

The Media module creates Media entity objects, which are fieldable. That means we can already attach any fields or taxonomy to any media object, which goes a long way towards handling metadata. However, Media metadata needs are variable and complex. For instance, a field might be fine for adding a taxonomy vocabulary for Video genre or Bird species, but you would need something better if you want to automatically add video duration, YouTube categories, or grab a music file's getID3 data. Basically, we need a larger discussion of what's necessary, what's possible, and how we get there. See this Media metadata issue for more background.

Display Formatting

Currently, we're using the Styles module to power display formatting. We may or may not continue using that. In any case, we'll need to ensure the formatters more closely follow Media Types, and we'll need to offer a pluggable UI for changing formatter style presets, similar to Image Styles (Imagecache in core, for those not yet familiar).

Media DX Summit 2010?

I'd love to lock up some fellow developers for a couple of days in a room to bang on these ideas. At the same time, my partner Gwen is due on May 22 for our second child, so firstly, I can't really travel any time in the foreseeable future, and secondly, even if we had a summit here in Harrisburg, it would either have to be like this week, or in mid-summer. Considering the deadlines involved for this, we need to get cranking. Thus, the summit I would love to see happen will probably either have to happen remotely, or perhaps without my involvement. :(

Anything Else?

Are there any other issues you would suggest to be critical beta-blockers? Do you have any thoughts to add to the issues I've suggested? Please add to this thread!

Thanks,
Aaron Winborn

(Cross-posted at g.d.o.)

Jon Stacey has been a stellar student, exactly the person whom everyone hopes to attract with the Google Summer of Code. He spent the first couple of weeks becoming familiar with the project, which was to help develop the Media module for Drupal, then made a strong case to switch the focus of the project to bring the desired features directly into Drupal core.

Video: 

For anyone interested, here's the latest mockup for the Media module, courtesy of Maarten Verbaarschot (mverbaar) of the D7UX team!

(original at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mverbaar/3632702590/in/set-72157619245872526/)

You can see more screenshots at the D7UX Microproject - Media Library for D7 issue.

And Jon Stacey (jmstacey) is doing a bang-up job of helping to realize this vision, via the Google Summer of Code! He's been hard at work with Andrew Morton (drewish), another co-mentor, to make this happen for Drupal 7. (And yes, we're also continuing to back-port this work into 6.)

Make sure to attend the Media Sprint Update Panel and join the Media Sprint 2009 at Open Media Camp in Denver, on April 18-19!

The presenters of this panel, including Aaron Winborn (aaron), Arthur Foelsche (arthurf), and Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg (Alex UA), will discuss the ongoing efforts of the Media Sprint by the Drupal Media working group to bring to fruition the Media module and related work.

This panel will begin with a demonstration and discussion of the current state of the ongoing development of the Media module, and a thorough examination of the concept for its extensible API. Finally, we'll discuss the near and far-term plans, including the Media Sprint planned for the next day of the Open Media Camp.

The Media Sprint 2009 Wiki has a rough outline, based on an earlier document started by arthurf, but needs some serious fleshing out. I plan to begin working in earnest again on the sprint later next week and the following (am trying to slot 3-4 solid working days towards it).

There are also several volunteers who have offered to help over the coming weeks as well. We need to try to build some organization.

I'm up against a couple of roadblocks with both the Media module and its included Resource module, and need some advice to go forward with those.

Particularly, I'm not sure what's intended during media_ahah_formatter_load(), which is what, I imagine, needs to both save the gathered resource into the file system, and make sure it adds to the field or attachment in the form. Arthur's also mentioned some difficulties in conceptualizing how we'll know what metadata to collect between submission and uploading.

I've also run into problems with the Resource module in my starts for Media: YouTube. For instance, we have to instantiate some classes during hook_boot, but don't have access to drupal_get_path() at that phase of the boot process. I've created a hackish work-around, where we store the module's path during installation, and check in hook_exit if the path has changed so we can set the new variable. I'm convinced it's not the best method, but haven't figured another yet.

So I'm opening this thread (at gdo) for questions of this nature, hoping people can help out, or at least take a closer look at the modules to help flesh out a TODO list for myself and other interested developers. I personally will have a lot more questions as I go along.

Thanks,
Aaron

(Cross-posted at Groups.Drupal.org.)

The future of Drupal Multimedia is now!

The Media Sprint: 2009 is continuing to build up steam. I met with the folks at Zivtech in Philly yesterday, and we banged on the Media module some more. Jody Hamilton made improvements, fixing up a few things, ensuring the browser works with multiple fields, etc.

I continued backporting the Resource module (bundled with the module) to Drupal 6, to enable PHP Stream Wrappers. After that, I started work on the new Media: YouTube module and stream wrapper.

Here's a hint of how difficult it will be to implement a new stream wrapper for another third party media provider. (Drum roll, please...)

Any questions?

Well, okay, so there will be a little more, such as parsing the URL of a passed media page. But really, it's not going to be much more than that to tie in the basic functionality of Embedded Media Field into the new "File Browser of the Internet" that we're creating with the Media Sprint.

(Next up for this particular wrapper: tie it into the YouTube API so we can save uploads to YouTube with the file system...)

Tomorrow (January 27, 2009) we'll be continuing the Media Sprint 2009, at the Zivtech office in Philly. Our stated goals: document the heck out of the Media module, and get a new PHP Stream Wrapper ready for it. And afterwards, at 3:30 PM EST, we'll meet with the Drupal Dojo to teach interested folks how to write their own!

For more information, see Media Sprint Wiki at http://groups.drupal.org/node/18063, Documentation at http://drupal.org/node/356802, and Media Module at http://drupal.org/project/media. You can also view a Proof of Concept video at http://www.24b6.net/2009/01/09/media-sprint-prototyping.

New panel at DrupalCon DC: Media Sprint 2009!

This January, several developers met in NYC and virtually to launch an effort to overhaul media and file handling in Drupal. The ongoing work is now coming to fruition, and this panel will present the changes and their implications to the community. Using the Media module, it's now possible for a user to use a single GUI to manage all files, including external sources such as a CDN, Amazon S3, and YouTube. We will examine the underlying PHP Stream Wrappers and Media API that makes this possible.

I will join Arthur Foelsche and Darrel O'Pry to help present this topic.

Arthur and I will co-present a recap of last week's exciting Media Code Sprint, held in various offices in NYC! We'll be doing this with the Drupal Dojo, using DimDim.

Media Code Sprint Recap
Tuesday, January 13, 2008 at 3:30 PM (EST)

Why You Want to Be There

• Because you want to learn about the future of multimedia in Drupal.
• Because you want to help transform multimedia handling for Drupal.
• Because everything you thought you knew about Drupal and multimedia is about to be obsolete (and why that's a good thing)...

I'll post a synopsis and schedule in the morning, so stay tuned!

Wow!

Here's a sampling of some stuff that's already happened the last couple of days:

• Media Sprint file upload proposal
• Media Sprint prototyping
• Media module
• Stream module

Proof of concept video after the break: