Why do we complain about Drupal media solutions? (AKA LFFAMHOAFA pt. 2)

slashrsm — Thu, 12 Sep 2013 14:33:31 +0000

Why do we complain about Drupal media solutions? (AKA LFFAMHOAFA pt. 2) slashrsm Thu, 12.09.2013 - 16:33

This is second post in a series of blog posts related to my DrupalCon Prague session called "Let's fix file and media handling once and for all". In the first article I invited community to complete a survey.

In my first post I asked you to complete the survey about Drupal media. Response was great, as more than 200 members of our great community responded. One thing I was most interested in were most desired features and how successfully we handle those in various media solutions. Importance of each feature was between 1 (not important at all) to 5 (I can't live without it). I calculated average score and sorted them based on it. This are 10 most important ones (complete results can be downloaded below):

Embed media in WYSIWYG - 4.24
Re-use of media - 4.23
Site-wide media library - 3.98
Ensuring accessibility (alt/title tags, captions, subtitles, transcriptions, ...) - 3.96
Organize media in folders/categories - 3.85
Seamless integration with remote media (FTP, HTTP, YouTube, Flickr, ...) - 3.73
Search in media (in context of library and/or attach/usage workflow) - 3.71
Advanced formatting options/abilities (view modes, advanced file formatters, ...) - 3.67
Add/edit metadata on file level (fieldable files) - 3.66
Upload multiple files in one step - 3.65

The list didn't surprise me at all. I expected a bit different order, but the selection was in accordance with my expectations. There is, however, something that I find very interesting; at least 80% of this features are successfully implemented in Media/File entity, Scald and Asset. It seems like we have pretty powerful solutions, but we still complain about media handling being broken in Drupal. I am wondering why....

I am perfectly aware that features are not the single important thing. There is documentation, ease of use, content creator experience, development momentum etc. I certainly have my opinion about that, but I'd like to hear yours. Please leave comment below or tweet me...

DrupalCon Denver 2011 - Media derivatives: take control over your files

slashrsm — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 21:45:07 +0000

DrupalCon Denver 2011 - Media derivatives: take control over your files slashrsm Mon, 07.11.2011 - 22:45

Derivatives API is a Drupal project I developed during this year's Summer of Code. It is a framework, that tries to implement a simple, reliable and powerfull framework for asset derivation in Drupal. It can cover a lot of different use cases. We are in the times of emerging new technologies of HTML5, mobile publishing, responsive web, ... I believe that Derivatives API has it's piece in a puzzle of support of this new technologies on Drupal.

In cooperation with my mentor, Kevin Reynen, I proposed a session at DrupalCon Denver, where we'd like to present this project to the wider public. Session will cover basic functionalities of the project, some possible use cases and it's extension with your own plugins.

Would you like to hear about this project on DrupalCon? Please vote for our session.

Do you have any suggestions or questions? Feel free to comment here or on session proposal.

Hope to see you in Denver!