On October 23-24, Jonathan and I met with some of the top Drupal Media developers in NYC for a code sprint. The purpose of the sprint was to bring to fruition the vision of the Media module for Drupal 7, which will act as a unified media file browser for the Internet, allowing editors to easily access and attach local and remote media to online content, such as images, YouTube videos and the like, all from one interface.
Advomatic also helped Maarten Verbaarschot fly from the Netherlands so he could contribute his experience with User Experience. You can see his flickr slideshow and YouTube demos here and here of the planned outcome.
The sprint was great fun! Jody and Maarten hunkered in one corner and bashed out the UI, while Peter and Darrel worked out some of the FileField integration. Meanwhile Arthur whipped out a File Metadata implementation, and I began teasing the existing work out of Drupal 6 and into Drupal 7.
Also in the fray were Jonathan, Forest, Rob, Oleg, and Jen, who participated in varying degrees. Jen also took the opportunity to begin a cool new core theme for Drupal 7, and with Darrel’s help took some time to give us a pre-fab image field with core articles! W00T!
The sprint was an amazing success. The module works now, as evidenced by Arthur’s demonstration screencast. After installing Media, you can browse your file system in the administrative screen, with lovely thumbnails representing the file objects. The same action is also available when uploading a new file.
In the past couple of weeks, we’ve also made strides towards implementing remote streams, with the Media: YouTube module almost ready for unveiling.
What’s next?
Well, there’s still more to come, and we could definitely use your help. We have the beginnings of Media Styles, to do for files what ImageCache (Image Styles in 7 core) does for images. Once we’ve got YouTube working, we’ll need to crank out a dozen or two other remote streams, to work out the kinks in the system (and to help make the whole thing infinitely more usable). We’ll definitely need willing beta-testers active in the issue queue, and there are still a few lingering questions for #d7ux. And we haven’t even begun talking WYSIWYG yet…
Make sure to check out some photos from the sprint!
Advomatic is heavily committed to helping bring the Drupal Media dream to fruition. Our developers are among its top contributors. Make sure to read Aaron’s Drupal Multimedia, and call on us to help with your Internet media needs.