A YouTube clone? In Drupal? Of course!
I was asked by the organizers of the Do It With Drupal seminar if I would like the opportunity to create a YouTube clone in Drupal and talk about that process with the community. Of course!
Do It With Drupal will take place in New Orleans, from December 10-12, 2008. Besides my YouTube clone, other showcase fantasy sites will also be presented, including Flickr, Twitter, and FreshBooks.com clones. All built with Drupal! And that’s just the first day. There are some really big name folks presenting at the seminar, like Earl Miles, Robert Douglass, Gábor Hojtsy, John Resig (who wrote jQuery), Matt Westgate, Moshe Weitzman, Angela Byron, James Walker, and more! Seriously, check out the speaker list if you haven’t yet.
Now that I’ve agreed to that, it means up all this personal time I just freed up from finishing up Drupal Multimedia (which goes to the printers on Monday!) will now go to building this fun site…
How to Do YouTube With Drupal
First, it’s got to be Drupal 6. “What?” some might ask. “Drupal 6 is not ready for production! Especially not for something as ambitious as a YouTube clone!”
But others nod their heads in agreement. The reality is that there are several production sites already using the release, especially with CCK and Views pretty much working properly now. Even Panels has an alpha, which I’m excited to get my hands on.
“How do you plan to display video?” others might ask. Of course, as most of us know by now, there are good solutions for video, even in Drupal 6. Obviously, I’ll use FileField + jQuery Media for file management and display. For the player itself, I plan to showcase the Drupal Media Player for this site, especially with all the work that BrightLoudNoise has done on that module. Yes, it’s not ready yet, but we’ve got a couple of months to get that going.
In what seems like a twisted self-referential parody, in addition to uploading videos for display, I also plan to allow users to upload YouTube videos to this YouTube clone, using Embedded Media Field. How cool is that?
Off to work now. Hope to see you in New Orleans!