Almost exactly two months ago 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.
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!
Photo by Stefanie Gupta
Sprint was a success! We pushed forward many parts of the media ecosystem, but I'd like expose few things I am very excited about.
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Image cropping: along with few minor improvements to the Crop API we did a lot of work on first UI module based on it, Image widget crop.
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Entity embed: our embedding component got many low-level improvements, general consolidation and clean-up. On top of that we finally added integration with the Entity browser, which significantly improves user experience when selecting an entity for embedding. Instead of just the auto-complete field now we're finally able to use an arbitrary Entity browser for the job.
- Field formatter: this module provides formatters for entity reference fields. It allows us to represent a referenced entity with one of it's fields. At the sprint we committed an initial implementation of the module, which is still very rough around the edges. However, we are actively, as part of the announced Media initiative program, working on it. We'd like to encourage everyone to give it a try and let us know what you think.
- File entity: very well known module from Drupal 7 world. At the sprint we more or less achieved feature parity with it's D7 version. We also moved it the official Drupal media group on GitHub and we hope to bring it back to drupal.org as soon as possible.
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Entity browser: we finally managed to start working on configuration UI. It is almost there and we are doing our best to finish it as soon as possible. We also improved UX of the default field widget that comes with the module. Additional to the "Remove" operation we added support for editing selected entities.
- Media entity and friends: entire family of Media entity modules has seen many improvements. We improved test coverage, fixed many bugs and added field formatters for many media types.
There is much more work that was done, but unfortunately I'm unable to mention everything here. We consistently tagged all issues that were touched during that week. We encourage everyone to check the complete list of issues or our public sprint board to learn more.
I'd like to thank to everyone that helped us to make this sprint come true: MD Systems, Ringier, Südostschweiz, Gassmann media, Miro Dietiker (@miro_dietiker), Jerome Zech (@J_Zech), Sascha Grossenbacher (@berdir), Florian Weber (@webflo), Daniel Wehner (@dawehner), Sanja Milanović (@sanja_m), Vladimir Mitrović (@devlada), Miloš Denčev (@denchev), Lukas von Blarer (@lukas-von-blarer), Tassilo Groeper (@pheadeaux), Eduard Reñé Claramunt (@edurenye), Saša Nikolič (@sasanikolic), Miloš Bovan (@mbovan), Tram Anh Duong (@tduong), Wim Leers (@WimLeers), Christophe Galli (@cgalli), Alexandre Mallet (@woprrr). You are awesome!
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 of 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.