Drupal Media: a new approach to rich content

(notes from a session at DrupalCon 2010)

Media module is already in use at Drupal Gardens; only available for D7.

After 10 years, still no good solution for adding media to Drupal 6 content

too many modules to choose from, no single easy solution
file field and WYSIWYG don't play well together
hard to integrate different kinds of content, so we have video, image, audio modules and so forth
end user experience sucks - procedure for adding rich media is different in every instance; layout is limited; other platforms (such as Wordpress) beat Drupal across the board.

how Wordpress does it

set of buttons above WYSIWYG editor for inserting media
can select from existing library (including search feature), Flickr and other external sites, with consistent interface.

Where are we with Drupal 7?

Filefield and Imagefield in core, slightly more consistent interface
imagecache in core (styles and sizes)
huge improvements in stream wrappers (more on that below)
but there's a lot of room for improvement! content is treated differently by medium, file management is largely absent.

Media module provides a common framework so contrib developers to focus on formatting solutions

in development since October 2008
Media Module is different because files are files, with a unified interface.
Stream wrappers = a structured way to represent streamable (non-local) resources, allowing local and remote files to be treated the same way. URLs are stored in the files table of the database.

WYSIWYG integration - just click button to pop up media browser
when a file is embedded in a node, it gets a record in the files table, so you can track how/if/where a file is being used
admin/content/media screen displays all files
alt text is handled per instance, since it's HTML
mass import from a folder at content/media/import
media files are entities and can have fields (admin/structure/media), but a file is also a field that can be attached to other entities (including other media files)

how to make a media browser plugin

hook_media_browser_plugins
need Drupal head and media module head, ckeditor with wysiwyg module
install profile: project/media_dev
need contrib developers to get behind this project! No more reinventing the wheel!

There will not be a backport to D6 because the necessary infrastructure isn't there. Upgrade from D6 to D7 will almost certainly be tough.

Interdependent Web