Confessions of a cat

 

Drupal Multimedia

Drupal Multimedia has been released towards the end of 2008. It was written by Aaron Winborn, who also wrote and maintains the embedded field (emfield) module for drupal.

 The book has 11 chapters of which one is a general introduction probably not necessary for anyone who has spent at least a week with drupal.

An other chapter, the very last one, is devoted to future speculation regarding drupal and internet trends in general. It is an interesting read nonetheless. There are some words about microformats, rdf and “the” semantic web amongst other things.

So skipping these two chapters that don’t really deal with the subject matter, the rest of the book deals with 3 things:

1. images, both local and remote (flickr for instance) embedding and theming them
2. videos, local and third party embeddable ones (youtube, etc.) and theming them
3. audio (you guessed right, local and not so local ones) and theming again

In general if you have no idea how you can use images, video or audio with drupal, have never heard of CCK and Views and have not got the faintest idea about theming then this book is highly recommended for you.

If you have already been exposed to modules such as Image, Imagefield and Filefield then you might not learn too much from this book.

Also as the whole drupal infrastructure tends to quickly change over time the information contained in the book is not the most up to date (understandable), and might not contain the ideal solution (or close to it) to your problems.

The author gives good ideas though, so if you have no idea how you can build an mp3 player with playlist support or how you can add a thumbnail for a video file that is shown on page load (like youtube) or how to create an image gallery, then give it a go. You won’t regret it.

If you already know all these then this book is clearly not for you.

Off the top of my head I also very much miss the mention of such modules as inline and wysywig.

The inline module is capable of quickly adding image support to your content. It is quite simple to use (but not for a drupal newbie, I think). You just install it, enable and modify one of the filters to include this. Enable the upload core module, and in your node edit form, upload some images. Now you may include the image you wish by writing [inline:#=title] or [inline:name-of-file=title] where # is the number of file uploaded (starts with 1 for first file, etc.).
It is true that you need to take care of image sizes (or enable the built in imagecache support, but then all your images will be of close to one size), and that you won’t see the image itself in the content editor. True, but you probably already know how the image looks, and you can still use the preview feature of drupal. This is a very light way of adding image support, and also, your images will not be plagued with absolute url’s (which is bad if you develop locally then upload to a remote server, and now you need to change the links to the images in the database… not good).

The wysywig module is the now de-facto way of adding wysywig editor to drupal. These are fckeditor, tinymce, and some other lesser known and used but lighter (and thus faster, but also with less features) editors. If you want your users to easily be able to format their content (bold, italic, lists, left- right- alignment, etc.) and probably upload and insert images into the content then this module is essential. The quite recent image resize filter module might also come handy if you do not want to educate your users about the importance of resizing their images before upload.

Now all in all: if you are a beginner drupaller, then this book is definitely a good buy.

If you have been playing around with views, cck, and images and maybe have heard about the emfield module, then you can skip it. Spend some time with theming if you have not already and you will figure it out by yourself - which is in my opinion a much better learning experience.

And in the end, as it belongs to this subject, I strongly recommend the screencasts from drupaltherapy.com. Sean does a pretty good job of showing off some of the capabilities of these modules.