Aaron Winborn

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.)

At the Open Media Camp in Denver yesterday, Kevin Reynen (kreynen) got things off to a great start with Overview of Metadata Standards for Video - Why doesn't it work like a Library? We discussed the difficulties of even agreeing on a standard set of genres for tagging video, from how to decide what genres to include in a taxonomy to the user interface in presenting those options to editors. (For instance, he said that his experience with the standards used at PEGMedia.org is that editors often use the Action genre by default, which is listed first in the listing, rather than scrolling through the hierarchy of available choices.)

I was reminded during this discussion of a book I read last summer, Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, by David Weinberger. I mentioned the book, and got a few nods and a few shakes of the head. Seems quite a few people have looked at these issues from a lot of directions...

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.

Wednesday afternoon/evening (starting at 5:15), Andrew Morton (drewish) and I will be co-presenting The Future of Files and Media in Drupal 7, where we'll talk about the big changes to the File API from 6 to 7, and efforts to backport some of the functionality into 6. Following this, we'll segue into a BOF with Arthur Foelsche (arthurf), where we'll discuss some of the exciting things coming from the Media Sprint 2009. (In fact, he and I worked on the Media module some tonight, putting in some exciting md5 hashing to allow jQuery to communicate indirectly with Drupal about uploaded files without compromising security or speed).

See you then!

FYI, I'm planning to do a Dojo session (using DimDim) sometime hopefully early this week around Embedded Media Field, with the following goals:

* Create a provider file for Hulu.com: This will cover the basic steps to create an include file for emfield, with a basic video provider who provides an API. As Hulu.com implements oEmbed, this will also give a brief introduction to that standard. As Hulu.com will not be included as part of the package of emfield, this will also show the expected way to provide a file outside of the base module.
* Create a provider file for IMDB. This media provider does not offer an API, so it gives a basic introduction to the difficulties involved in accommodating such a provider. Even though IMDB uses Hulu for its videos, their TOS prohibits page scraping. So any techniques covered in this portion of the demonstration are for instructional purposes only.

This live session will be for intermediate developers. It assumes you know how to build a module, and that you understand Drupal's hook system. It will be recorded for later viewing.

Date/time and more info later.

(Cross-posted at the Drupal Dojo.)

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.)

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.

Here's the DimDim recap of the first Drupal Dojo session of the year, where Arthur Foelsche (arthurf) and I recapped the initial push in the ongoing Media Sprint! You can skip the first few minutes; the action doesn't really begin until 3:50.

See the recap...