Drupal Multimedia takes an in-depth look at one of the most common questions posed by new (and old) Drupal developers: How can I place images/video/audio into my site?
Drupal is an open-source Content Management System (CMS), used on thousands of sites from personal blogs to e-commerce sites to media powerhouses. Although Drupal can be easily installed and configured to quickly get a site up with all the best features one might expect, its modular building blocks can be used to customize that site to fit the required solution.
For anything beyond a simple listing of files uploaded with content, multimedia handling requires modules and techniques beyond what's supplied with the core of Drupal. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your perspective), there are hundreds of modules that have been contributed by and for the community, which can handle nearly any current need. Drupal Multimedia will help you make sense of it all.
Chapter 1: It offers an in-depth introduction to Drupal and the basic modules required for most of the book. By the end of the chapter, you will have learned about the building blocks of Drupal, including nodes, users, themes, regions, and blocks. You will also have explored the Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views, learning to use them to create custom content and display it just the way you want.
Chapter 2: It will explore the Image module, and others that depend on its functionality, to easily create image galleries and attach images to content, or even place them inline using a WYSIWYG editor.
Chapter 3: It taps the power of CCK and Views, using ImageField and ImageCache to create powerful, custom solutions for image needs. Using these modules, you'll be able to quickly create your own custom content types and display images that can be altered on the fly, for resizing, cropping, and other manipulations. You'll also learn to create slide shows, and use Embedded Media Field to pull image content from Flickr and other third-party providers.
Chapter 4: Once you learned various ways to display an image, you'll learn how to override the display, to add effects such as drop shadows and rollovers. You'll use Firebug and the Theme Developer module to investigate a theme at its most basic building blocks, jump into PHPTemplate to transform our content, and study style sheets as a mean of controlling output from a user's browser.
Chapter 5: You'll learn how to embed and display third-party video within your content, using Embedded Media Field to automatically parse and display video from an editor's pasted URL from YouTube, Blip.TV, or other providers.
Chapter 6: It will show you how to supply video from your own server. Using the techniques and modules introduced here, specifically FileField and jQuery Media, you'll learn how to create your own YouTube clone. You'll also see how to create video thumbnail links and logo overlays for rudimentary branding.
Chapter 7: It will give a brief segue into file asset management, where you will learn various methods of controlling the workflow of media in your site. You'll see how to use Node Reference to tie disparate pieces of content together. You'll also examine the Asset module as an intuitive User Interface for editors to manage media, and Media Mover as a powerful back-end solution to bring videos, images, and audio into your file system, using FTP or even email as an alternative to a browser upload for attaching media to your content. You'll also briefly examine the benefits of using a third-party solution such as Kaltura for asset management and control.
Chapter 8: You'll learn how to use the Audio module as a powerful solution for integrating audio into your site. Using the node type created by the module, you'll be able to easily and quickly embed music and podcasts into your content.
Chapter 9: Using the FileField + jQuery Media solution examined earlier, you'll see how to use that for finite and flexible control over audio content. This separates audio functionality from the node, placing it into the field, so you will have the full benefits of CCK and Views for controlling our data. you'll also examine how the Embedded Media Field can be used to embed third-party audio content with the same ease as with images and video.
Chapter 10: It explores some advanced techniques to control our audio content, creating play lists, both automatic editor-controlled and custom end-user defined. You'll also see how to allow end users to embed audio content from our sites in their own blogs, with a method that can be extrapolated for the other types of media.
In the final chapter, you'll take a look at the future of multimedia and Drupal. For the near term, you'll examine some great things coming for Drupal 7, such as Fields and better media handling in the core. You'll also take a longer view, of the role of multimedia in the semantic web, mobile media, and even experimental new types of embeddable media.
Drupal Multimedia is written for people interested in learning how to better control and display media on their sites. The book is written for beginners and intermediate developers, although some of the techniques are admittedly advanced. The author assumes you already have a Drupal installation to work with, but will guide you through the administration and development of your site as it applies to each section of the book. If you do not yet know how to install Drupal on a web host's server, you are directed to Drupal.org for more information. A video cast is available at http://drupal.org/videocasts/installing-6 that can guide you through the steps of installation.
Please visit this book's companion site at DrupalMultimedia.org, where you can see live demonstrations of all the techniques explored here.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."
A block of code will be set as follows:
regions[left] = Left sidebar regions[right] = Right sidebar regions[upper] = Upper regions[content] = Content regions[header] = Header
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
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