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)

Enabling audio play


Our first task will be to enable audio uploads with audio play capabilities. Formerly, this was accomplished using a dedicated audio field type which third-party modules provided to extend content types using the Content Construction Kit (CCK) framework.

We've already been using the Media module for pictures and videos and we can make use of it to provide our audio content as well. Doing so will allow us to manage all of our media resources in the same place, using the media browser. Keeping in mind that the Media module is only about setting the grounds for managing media resources, we will need to enable a media player that will be able to stream those audio formats. Luckily, both MediaElement and MediaFront provide this support using HTML5's <audio> tag.

Adding a new content type

Tracks will be the name of our new content type, for users to be able to upload their songs, vocals, instrumental music tracks, or audio content in general. Once uploaded, they will be...