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)

Visualizing data with graphical charts


These days, more than ever, the web is making use of graphical charts to visualize data. Tools which provide information about trends, analytics and statistics have been made available for users to leverage insights.

The rise of big data technology (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_data) enables computers to perform complex analysis and produce insights on large scale data. With the help of smart algorithms, information can be visualized in a simple manner using graphical charts. Evidence to this can be see in Google's Trends tool (http://www.google.com/trends), and other services such as Google Analytics or Google Adsense. YouTube's video statistics are a common use and even SoundCloud, where a user can take a look at his or hers audio tracks popularity trend as shown in the following screenshot:

Versions prior to Drupal 7 featured charting modules based on open source libraries, such as open flash charts which required browser's Adobe Flash plug-in...