We're going to spend some time in this chapter dealing with file asset management. Having a good workflow and system for file management is a requirement for many larger sites, and is useful even for blogs.

As media handling in Drupal has matured, so has asset management. However, because the Drupal core currently does little to help in this regard, several contributed modules have emerged to fill the gap.

In fact, a common complaint among developers for Drupal is that the core file handling (as of Drupal 6) is inadequate to the task of managing file assets, causing it to be a tedious and contradictory process. For instance, we already saw the conflicts between how Image nodes and Image fields are handled, and the difficulty of sharing files between them (which are mitigated by several contributed modules).

There are plans in place to fix this in Drupal 7, such as the proposed hook_file patch (at http://drupal.org/node/142995). Meanwhile, several competing...