Product Description

In Detail

Adding and handling multimedia in Drupal, such as images or video, requires the use of many contributed modules, and deciding which ones to use and how to get the most from them is often not a straightforward task.

This book will guide you through the steps necessary to add image, video, audio, and Flash elements into your Drupal sites. The book will take you through the contributed modules for handling media, showing you what they do, when to use them, and how to get the most from them. When contributed modules aren't enough, you will see examples of custom Drupal development to add that special touch to your media.

What you will learn from this book? You will learn to:

• Find your way round contributed modules for adding media to Drupal sites
• Store and display images in nearly any configuration a client may desire
• Scale and crop images before display on your site with ImageCache
• Add effects to your images such as drop shadows, light boxes, and more
• Examine how a developer may use Views, Embedded Media Field, and other tools to make embedding video even easier
• Add and manipulate video at a field level using the File Field module
• Create thumbnail overlays with jQuery
• Create custom audio fields

Approach

This book will guide you through the steps necessary to add image, video, audio, and Flash elements into your Drupal sites. For each topic, you start with simple techniques and move on to more advanced techniques. By the time you've completed this book, you should have a firm ground from which to tackle most multimedia needs, and enough of an understanding to creatively solve more complex problems.

Who this book is written for?

This book will provide information for administrators and professional site developers who are required to embed multimedia into a Drupal site. The reader needs basic knowledge of Drupal operation, but no experience of how Drupal handles multimedia items is expected.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #139607 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

About the Author
Aaron Winborn

Aaron Winborn has been developing websites since the mid-90s. Beginning as a freelancer while teaching at a Sudbury school (a democratic and age-mixed model for young people), his clients demanded more and more features, until he (like everyone and their grandmother) realized he had built a full-featured content management system that required more work to develop and maintain than he was able in his spare time.

He realized at some point that somewhere in the world of Open Source, someone had to have created and released something to the community. Of course, the wonderful news was Drupal.

After converting the existing sites of his clients to Drupal, he continued learning and began to contribute back to the community. About this time, Advomatic, a company with similar interests and a commitment to the Drupal community, began expanding beyond the initial partners who formed it in the wake of Howard Dean's presidential campaign of 2004. Aaron realized that his own goals of creating great sites with a team would be better matched there, and he was hired as their first employee.

Since that time, he has helped to develop some excellent sites, with clients such as Air America Radio, TPM Cafe, NRDC, Greenopia, Mountain News, Viacom, and Bioneers. He has also contributed several modules to Drupal, mostly stemming from his work with multimedia, including Embedded Media Field (for third-party Video, Audio, and Images), Views Slideshow (to create slide shows out of any content), and the RPG module (for online gaming, still in progress).

Customer Reviews

Provides both helpful context and practical details
Having worked with Drupal for two years, I have reached the point where I need expert advice in order to continue to grow. Drupal is a bit like a forest with many paths running through it. You could spend all year trying each one and learning from experience, or you could get an experienced hand to point you in the right direction, especially if you cannot devote all your time to learning Drupal.

Aaron Winborn is experienced, knowledgeable, and helpful, if his writing at all reflects the man. The creator of the Embedded Media Field module, his has recognized expertise in configuring Drupal to handle multimedia content. In Drupal Multimedia, Winborn describes the state of Drupal multimedia support with one eye toward Drupal history and the other exploring the future. Context helps achieve deeper understanding.

For most of the book explains how to include images, video, and audio in Drupal sites. In these chapters, I found answers to questions I had been asking for a while. What felt right about the Image module (e.g., image galleries), and what needed fine-tuning to work better (e.g., WYSIWYG integration)? Winborn takes the reader from Image to Image Assist, Image Attach, and finally the TinyMCE DrupalImage button, the last of which had escaped me in my previous forays into online documentation and support forum discussions. I was only disappointed not to find an answer to another longstanding want: easy bulk image upload for end-users.

Winborn does not always take a single path through the forest. Often, he points out two or three different paths that might work well for your needs, while omitting mention of those that (I assume) he feels might not. After the comprehensive introduction to Image, Winborn changes approach. He describes how to use ImageField and ImageCache in conjunction with one's own custom content type. Comparing the two approaches not only helped me better understand how to structure my own approach but also provided an important insight into the Drupal ecosystem.

Winborn takes care not to blow his own horn too loudly. His creation, Embedded Media Field, plays third string behind other image solutions. The explanation is critical to integration with third-party media hosts such as Flickr and YouTube.

Winborn introduces the book as a "beginner to intermediate" Drupal resource while acknowleding the advanced nature of some examples. I thought this description was right on. A Drupal beginner would likely not be comfortable implementing some of the solutions provided, for example adding a preprocess hook to display the appropriate media player for an attached video. On the other hand, I found the emphasis on Node Reference essential for me to understand how to keep media items in their own nodes yet allow web pages to display them in the proper player.

Later in the book, Winborn takes a couple of thoughtful turns. He treats video before audio, upsetting the conventional order between them yet explicitly acknowledging the dominance of video these days. He also presents the embedded video field before addressing how to upload "local" video files. That also makes good sense to me, as I have quickly discovered how even a low-volume site benefits from hosting video at a specialized provider, such as Blip.tv.

Your perspective on the book may depend on your definition of "beginner" and "intermediate." I benefitted from both the high-level view and the relatively complex explanations. The book provided something to seek me teeth into and room for growth, which I imagine every Drupal developer needs. True beginners may quickly lose themselves in the details. Advanced users may not find the text sufficiently challenging.

Drupal Multimedia will remain an essential resource for me, due to its vertical treatment of key techniques. Yet, I also find myself wanting more almost immediately. Will DrupalImage reach production site quality for Drupal 6? How should I provide bulk image upload capability to end users? What will support and maintenance of these techniques look like a year from now? While I am glad to have added this book to my knowledge base, I have quickly followed up the read with more tinkering on a test site and surfing the discussion forums.

Richard Kassissieh is Director of Information Technology at Catlin Gabel School.
He writes on Drupal and other topics at http://kassblog.com

Drupal, images, videos, audio and more
This books provides an excellent overview of how to use Drupal for multimedia. It discusses how to incorporate images, video and sound into your Drupal site. In describes Drupal modules which can be used to manage each of these types of content. What is really nice about this book is that it clearly describes the differences between the modules and their strengths and weaknesses. Its comparison of Image and ImageField is particularly good. It also discusses the configuration options for the different modules. Another strength of this books is that is clearly outlines how to use CCK and Views to manage and display media.

One way in which this book excels over other books is the fact that this book goes into detail of how to customize Drupal template files to better handle media. One key set of customizations that the book discusses is how to embed media. Images can be embedded in a more usable fashion using the Lightbox module. The author also outlines how to use images as part of slideshows and galleries. A gallery function comes with the Image module. But the book delves deeper into galleries and show how to create them using Views, Taxonomies and the customization of templates.

Customizations can also be made to better display video files. Either those uploaded to the site or those from third party services such as Blip.tv, YouTube or JumpCut to name a few. Local videos can also be nicely displayed by using the jQuery Media module. This module takes a media link and wraps it in the appropriate media player. This works with both video and audio files.

Like images, audio has it own module. This or the File Field module can be used to add audio to Drupal. Another cool customization for sound files that the book discusses is how to allow users to create their own playlists.

This book is chock full of helpful tips on how to handle media within Drupal. It has terrific examples not only of administrative configuration but also relevant PHP needed to customize templates. Drupal is an extremely powerful platform but the accompanying documentation available is lacking, particularly for the most recent version (6.x). This book helps to fill in major gaps in the documentation available on the Drupal website. Additionally, it contains some of the most easy to read documentation I've been of customizing themes and templates.

The only downside of this book is the fact that several of the modules it recommends were still being updated for Drupal 6 at the time of publication. This means some of the directions and screenshots don't match the current interface exactly. Additionally, the following modules mentioned in the book still haven't been updated from Drupal 6.

* Acidfree Albums
* Image watermark
* jCarousel
* Magnifier
* Asset
* Media Mover
* XSPF Playlist Module

This aside though. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned SO much from it. I've been working with Drupal for about a year and learning as I go via books and hands on experience. This book gave me a much better sense of what Drupal is capable of in terms of media. I actually know where to start for a change. Additionally, I actually developed a useful understand themes and templates enough so I can make changes. If you want to incorporate media into your Drupal site I HIGHLY recommend this book.

drupal can build flickr, youtube or twittv
Drupal Multimedia

Drupal has had a great run in the book publishing arena these last few months. Drupal Multimedia is the latest book on the street. I really liked Drupal 6 Themes because it had a focus on something that was very important for an aspiring drupal ninja. Well now Drupal Multimedia is my latest favorite book. Aaron Winborn is truely an expert on the subject with the added bonus of being a good writer.

This book goes through Pictures, Video and Audio and discusses the modules to use, (including CCK and views) and how to get the output to look the way you want it. I was very happy to see that this book really goes in depth with the examples, this book has more examples of using theme function over-rides than I have seen in one place - more than just "breadcrumbs"!

The only negative I find with this book is the fact that some of the modules discussed are not available for Drupal Version 6. This is made very clear in the book -- and it is a function of when the book was written. The ones I checked still are not upgraded - certainly not the authors fault and a hazard of writing a book about a fast moving target.

Another thing unique about this "very hands on" with lots of examples book is that the author uses the last chapter of the book to make predictions about the future of Drupal. I like his predictions and hope they come true. He even makes "embedded smell field" seem like something that we really need ... you have to read it because it is for real.

I give this book two thumbs up!