Book Image

Drupal 7 Media - Third Edition

By : Liran Tal
Book Image

Drupal 7 Media - Third Edition

By: Liran Tal

Overview of this book

Integrating images, video, and audio content on a Drupal site requires knowledge of appropriate community modules, and an understanding of how to configure and connect them properly. With the power of up-to-date technologies such as HTML5, responsive web design, and the best modules available in Drupal's eco-system, we can create the best Drupal 7 media website. Drupal 7 Media is a practical, hands-on guide that will introduce you to the basic structure of a Drupal site and guide you through the integration of images, videos, and audio content. Learn to leverage the most suitable community modules and up-to-date technology such as HTML5 to offer a great user experience through rich media content. The book begins with a practical introduction to the basic Drupal building blocks. It then breaks down each media resource, and explores them in detail. You will learn how to leverage Drupal's community modules to implement support for images, videos, and audio content, along with the best practices for implementation. We will be mentioning ideas throughout the book, which you can extend upon and use to build your own web applications. We will explore HTML5 support for media resources, the semantic web, and responsive web design, which are key topics in modern web application development. We will then build upon this knowledge and add more functionality to our sample website, such as support for analytic charts and customizing images, all of which we will implement using our own custom modules. You will learn everything you need to know about building, extending, and configuring a Drupal 7 media web application.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

The Media module


In previous versions of Drupal, the basic image field type didn't exist by default nor did another facet of image handling—the Imagecache module, which enabled the management of different image pre-sets (thumbnail, large, and so on). As we've seen with the Memo content type, this is no longer the case in Drupal 7, and at least a very basic support for images that already exist.

While there are many ways to build image integration into Drupal, they may all stem from different requirements and also each option should be carefully reviewed. Browsing around over 300 modules available in the Media category in Drupal's modules search for Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org/project/modules) may have you confused as to where to begin.

We'll take a look at the Media module (http://drupal.org/project/media) which was sponsored by companies such as Acquia, Palantir, and Advomatic and was created to provide a solid infrastructure and common APIs for working with media assets and images specifically...