Media made a big leap towards a first major milestone. It's time to test what we have and help stabilise it.
At the beginning of November 2015 MD Systems announced the Media initiative program that they initiated in cooperation with Ringier, Gassmann media and Südostschweiz. Initiative was kicked off with a week long sprint, which happened at first week of December in Zurich. Work didn't end when sprint was over. Together with the team at MD Systems I continued to work on most important tasks to achieve a major milestone.
Photo by Stefanie Gupta
Note nr. 1: MD Systems are funding part of my time to work on Drupal 8 media. They are constantly investing in Drupal core and many contrib modules. They are one of the greatest Drupal service providers and number 1 Drupal organizational contributor taking their size into consideration. You need a site built? You should definitely get in touch with them.
Note nr. 2: Examiner.com (my employer and very well know enterprise Drupal 7 site) gives every developer a so-called "Drupal day" every other week. This allows me to work on Drupal 8 media components. We have been working on a Drupal 8 project for a while now, which also allowed me to do a lot of contrib work during my work hours. Thank you! You are great!
Since my last post we did a ton of work in many areas. Let me quickly list most important ones:
Image cropping: We added few more features to Crop API. Image widget crop used those to provide new features such as soft and hard crop size limits, handling of default crops and ability to use cropper tool outside of field widget context. This allowed us to add cropper tool to the file edit form that File entity provides. Image widget crop was also promoted to a full project on drupal.org. We also started working on Crop API integration for Focal point module, which is very close to be committed. This will bring even more standardization in this area, which is something we are very excited about.
File entity: we managed to bring this important module to the level where we can confidently say that it has reached feature parity with Drupal 7 version. This allowed us to bring it back home (to drupal.org) and make -dev version available on the project page.
Entity browser: we continued our work on the configuration UI. Patch is almost ready. We need few more people to help us with testing and reviews. I hope that we will be able to commit it in the next week or so. We also added new selection display plugin which supports multi-step workflow (upload few images, select few more from media library, import some more from a 3rd parts service, save everything in one step). This allows us to build content creation experiences that we never saw in Drupal core or contrib before. Plugin could use some visual improvements. This is great introductionary task for any themers and/or frontend develpers that would like to join us. Get in touch!
Image effects: together with @mondrake we started new project that will become home for majority of image effects that didn't find it's way into core. We already ported most of effects from ImageCache actions and added few more that lived in other Drupal 7 modules. Effects that are currently available in Image effects module are: watermark, auto orientation, brightness, color shift, contrast, set canvas and strip metadata. There is also text overlay effect that is waiting to be reviewed and tested.
There are many other things in different areas of the ecosystem. We fixed bugs and added features in Media entity, Field formatter, Inline entity form, Entity embed, ...
What is next
In the course of the next few weeks we need to review and commit remaining patches. After that we'd like to tag new releases for most of the modules in the ecosystem. This will encourage people to start actively using and testing them.
Media ecosystem for Drupal 8 is not perfect yet, but we are able to support more and more use cases. Testing, finding bugs and fixing them in a timely manner should be our priority at this point. We want to stabilize the ecosystem to allow our users to rely on our components.
How to help?
Start contributing. You can write documentation, test modules in the ecosystem and report bugs, fixing bugs or work on new features, design UX, write automated tests, share ideas and much, much more. You have a skill, we have a task for you.
We are available on IRC. Join us on #drupal-media channel on Freenode.net and get involved. We always publish general announcements on groups.drupal.org/media.
If you prefer more personal communication you can always ping me on Twitter (@slashrsm) or use the contact form on my blog to get in touch.
About me
I (Janez Urevc - @slashrsm) am one of the architects and maintainers of the media ecosystem for Drupal 8. If you like what I am doing please consider donating to my Bitcoin address: 1Xqe6gYWEbF1iKsy3Mr5SbAyebNyucj5t.
Together with some colleagues I'm building a small team of professionals that will be providing top-level consulting, training and development related to media in Drupal 8. If you're interested or you'd like to work with us please get in touch.