Good for absolute beginners | Drupal Multimedia

The book covers exactly what it claims to cover, and does so well | Drupal Multimedia | Aaron Winborn

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	• Drupal Multimedia Aaron Winborn Packt Publishing, 2008 - 264 pages average customer review:based on 11 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Control Your Media in Drupal

Drupal is a powerful tool for building amazingly scalable websites quickly and simply. The use of multimedia in Drupal has posed challenges to many users and developers of all abilities. Drupal Multimedia addresses the main questions regarding how to implement video, image, and audio content in a way that is elegant for the developer, as well as the end user. The language of the book is straight to the point, and provides a framework to practice building an assortment of multimedia sites using a variety of modules in the context of test or example sites.

I have used many of the modules that Aaron Winborn makes use of in the book and have had my own difficulties them. It is very helpful that he dissects each module and describes, in detail, what configurations work best and also provides code to make modules work differently or better. This information will save you time in trial and error and fills in the gaps sometimes present in the existing documentation of these modules.

Changing the way items are displayed is not always a simple task in Drupal. Drupal Multimedia tackles display overrides over the course of an entire chapter. It is important to know where to go to change the CSS of your page, and what modules and tools are best implemented to determine which theme functions and CSS information to alter. This by far was the most understandable treatment of theme overrides that I have read. The language is clear, and takes one step at a time using Firebug for Firefox and the Developer Module for Drupal.

Drupal Multimedia is an excellent book for anyone who needs to have more control over media in their Drupal websites. If you have any question about how to use or extend available contributed modules, this is your book. If you want to be able to tweak your theme output in your media site, get this book. Drupal Multimedia is a needed reference that is a powerful resource for the Drupal user.

Nicole Bluto
Drupal Developer and User
L.A. Drupal Member

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Good for absolute beginners

For anyone that has done any work with Drupal, I cannot recommend Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Winborn.

Developers new to Drupal will find a handy place to start when working with images, audio and video. The book serves as a very basic introduction to specific Drupal modules handling these different content types.

Most developers that have spent very much time on Drupal will not find this book nearly as useful though. The most important knowledge in this book could be condensed down into a nice list of modules ideal for specific tasks.

The majority of the book goes through configuration and use of these particular modules. There isn't anything advanced here, it really is just a hand holding exercise for those who are having a difficult time going through basic module setup.

Don't look here for anything useful in the theming or module development areas either. The few short forays into deeper water are all very basic and not very useful to seasoned developers. If you're a beginner, none of this is explained well enough to be applied to other, similair problems.

In summary, I can only recommend this book to you if you are an absolute beginner who has no intention to do any theming or module development for some time. For everyone else, my current recommendation is Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional).

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The book covers exactly what it claims to cover, and does so well

This book is relatively short, coming in at about 240 pages. It is also focused on only one part of using Drupal, which means that you don't have to sift through a lot of information you are not going to use. This is definitely not a basic, "here's how to install and get started easily" sort of text, but more of a precise guide to using Drupal to serve various forms of media files in a way that can be styled easily to fit in with your overall site theme, and that does not require the use of non-Drupal software or modules. In other words, my initial thought was that this book would be exactly what I needed for this phase of my current project, a Drupal site that needs to serve embedded video and audio, and which may end up serving photos in a gallery as well.

The book assumes the reader is capable of installing Drupal on a server and assumes you have a base installation up and running perfectly before beginning. It then starts with a quick introduction to the building blocks of Drupal: nodes, regions and blocks, themes, and modules. It discusses how to use CCK to create custom content types and fields, views to set up how they will be displayed, and breezes through the important parts of theming these additions to match the overall look and feel of your site. That is all in chapter one.

The next several chapters are filled with easy to use plans for installing and configuring various modules to deal with images, galleries, thumbnails, slideshows, audio and video. The author quite clearly describes how to get each of these media to fit in and work with your site, exactly how you would like it to work.

I am still in the planning stage of my current project. This was a good time to read through this book, because it gives me a chance to quickly and easily figure out what I can do for this client, without needing lots of extra time for research or requiring big modifications, and enables me to discuss the details intelligently and confidently with those making the decisions. If you have a similar project, the book is worth a look.

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Good introduction for new users

Drupal Multimedia, by Aaron Winborn, Packt Publishing, 2008

Drupal Multimedia covers the use of audio, video and image files within the popular Drupal open-source content management framework. The book is aimed at site architects, themers and Drupal developers, with an emphasis on those new to the platform.

Packt sent me a copy of the book for review, and I think that is an important statement. I would not have purchased this book otherwise, mostly because I have been using Drupal since 2004 and am familiar with the challenges and solutions discussed in this book. That said, I did learn some new tricks (jQuery Media, Dash Media Player), and I have tried to approach my final review as if I were new to Drupal.

Let me start the formal review by praising Winborn's depth of knowledge and commitment to Drupal and the issues regarding media handling. In fact, I use some of Aaron's work on every site that I build, and his contributions to hook_file() should make multimedia in Drupal 7 even stronger. This book, however, is about how we can put Drupal to work today while building sustainable web sites.

The collaboration on media has been a little contentious in the Drupal community - something Winborn deftly covers in Chapter 11, which covers the road ahead for media handling and reviews some of the challenges yet to be solved. The basic problem boils down to this: Drupal core does not have a media handling solution, and individual developers have tried to craft solutions for their specific problems. Making those solutions workable for the majority of use-cases is a great challenge. A good example of this is found in chapter 10, in the discussion of a specific solution for AirAmerica.com that leverages common solutions but still requires custom code. (An aside: the audio chapters of the book are probably the strongest section, though Winborn rightly notes that audio is often the overlooked medium in the multimedia mix.)

The book itself treats it material insightfully, with a strong organization and chapters that logically build on each other. Chapter one offers a crash course in Drupal basics and introduces some tools and concepts that are essential. It is important to note that the chapter begins with a succinct explanation of the Drupal philosophy that "the webmaster is dead"; the idea being that non-technical people should be given the tools needed to build a good web site without leaning the sometimes arcane nuances of the acronyms of the profession: HTML, LAMP, FTP, CSS and so on. Drupal and its developers strive to build a platform that can survive without them.

The problem, especially for the complex use-cases for multimedia presentation and storage, is in crafting solutions that can be configured rather than coded. Winborn does a commendable job explaining the factors that influence module selection, which is a critical topic given the state of uncertainty that revolves around file handling in Drupal.

And the rest of the book is largely given over to discussions and examples of how to select, install and configure various modules (Image, ImageField, Audio, MediaMover, Embedded Media Field, Lightbox 2) to accomplish specific tasks, like the building of a photo gallery or displaying an audio playlist. The solutions are sound and well-established best practices, and they should give the new user some firm footing to begin adapting Drupal to meet her needs. The book, rightly, makes clear that some customization through code will be likely, and there are some long passages devoted to theming the final HTML output that the new Drupaler should examine carefully (chapter 6 has a good example).

What will a new reader learn to do with this book? Here's a quick list:

Assess a site's media needs and select appropriate Drupal modules.
Display images within site content.
Create multiple image galleries.
Display images from Flickr or other third party hosting services.
Understand how to theme image display for Drupal.
Display video files hosted on BlipTV, Brightcove or other third-party services.
Display and host video from a local server.
Select a cross-browser media player.
Host media files on external services.
Upload and display audio files within site content.
Create and display audio playlists.
How to work with the Views module to create media galleries.
When and how to customize existing Drupal solutions for media display.
How to contribute to media handling in Drupal.

These topics are largely given equal treatment, and the style of the book is familiar and consistent, making for an easy read in as little as two hours.

There are some clunky moments in the book, such as two sections on User Images and the Taxonomy Image module that are unrelated to the rest of chapter 3 (but seem to have no home elsewhere in the book). The proofreading slips in a couple of cases (most blatantly on page 174), and the index is so thin that I was frustrated by it (security, GIMP, XSS and Zen are all missing.) On page 98, we suddenly jump back from Views 6.x.2 (used throughout the book) to Views 5.x.1 with no explanation.

There are also some implementation decisions I would argue with - especially using menu IDs (which are volatile and can be changed in the UI) as CSS class names in the CSS example on pages 120-2. And some strong concepts are missing - such as the way Embedded Media Field can be used with FeedAPI to automatically pull content from a YouTube or BlipTV RSS feed to create content on your site. The theme override tricks discussed on pages 104-5 are specific to Drupal 6 and, in my opinion, a non-standard solution to the problem at hand. That type of solution is generally handled at the theme layer without the need for hook_theme_registry_alter(). To his credit Winborn seems to be showing each of the options available to developers in the different examples - using module-based themes, template.php, preprocess theme functions, *.tpl.php files -- but this approach is not made clear and leaves me wondering why certain approaches are used at different times.

Most glaringly, I think the issue of security when dealing with files is not handled properly. The relationship between the IMG SRC tag and XSS attacks is a little arcane, and it needs a section early in the book to explain exactly why Drupal is so sensitive to user input. While the filter system (called Input Formats in the Drupal administrative interface) is covered in the book, that coverage is scattered and not grounded in a clear discussion of the security issues involved with allowing media uploads to your server and embedded media links into your content (the former issue is not discussed at all, as I recall; and the two issues are definitely not interchangeable).

Still, the coverage in the book is strong, and I would particularly encourage new developers to explore the Embedded Media Field (which is itself a secure solution to the problem of media files) and the FileField/ImageField combination when building (or testing) a Drupal site. One of the issues that the new developer will face, however, Winborn clearly states (numerous times): some solutions were only available for Drupal 5 (AcidFree Albums, MediaMover) at the time of writing, and may or may not be ready for Drupal 6. This issue is a common one in open source, and something that Drupal users will need to prepare for - most successfully by being an active member of the community, a theme that Winborn returns to continually.

How would I rate this book overall? For me, I think the book is a necessary one: it covers a topic vital to Drupal sites, and it gives a good overview of the issues and solutions available. But I don't think the book is a vital addition to my personal Drupal library. However, that statement should be qualified by the fact that, for instance, I have seen presentations and demonstrations of modules like Asset and MediaMover at DrupalCONs (annual Drupal user conferences in North America and Europe each year), and I have used many of these modules in production on sites like ForeignAffairs.com.

Given that the cost of the book easily comes under the cost of attending DrupalCON Paris (September 2009) and provides a worthy introduction to the topic, I would recommend the book for those new to Drupal, with a special note to those who may have inherited the support of a Drupal-powered web site, since the book will help you to understand why certain decisions have been made about how the site was constructed.

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Well Written and to the Point.

Drupal multimedia and multimedia capable web sites has been an interest of mine for a while now and this book helped me to focus my efforts, select from the more popular modules and even presented some alternates. I even went as far as revisiting possible Drupal WYSIWYGs to use as I had been using the simple user interface up till now. Now I have multiple Content Types, some for using TinyMCE and more advance tagging (HTML tagging not social tagging) of content, and the others use the simple user interface with no tagging at all. For me it's all about having choices.

This is definitely not a Drupal book for beginners, I'd say intermediates or better; you have to be comfortable moving through a Drupal site via administrator menus, checking module dependencies and reading up on and through existing module documentation on the Drupal site to get it all to work right.

I also liked the alignment with other popular modules such as CCK (which a book could be written for alone), jQuery Media, Asset and Media Mover.

And finally code. Small short and simple PHP code snippets (that you can download) that help or enhance are always welcome, as well as explanations of what results they will produce. Not about feeding someone's ego, but practical and useful.

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In Detail

Adding and handling multimedia in Drupal, such as images or video, requires the use of many contributed modules, and deciding which ones to use and how to get the most from them is often not a straightforward task.

This book will guide you through the steps necessary to add image, video, audio, and Flash elements into your Drupal sites. The book will take you through the contributed modules for handling media, showing you what they do, when to use them, and how to get the most from them. When contributed modules aren't enough, you will see examples of custom Drupal development to add that special touch to your media.

What you will learn from this book? You will learn to:
Find your way round contributed modules for adding media to Drupal sites Store and display images in nearly any configuration a client may desire Scale and crop images before display on your site with ImageCache Add effects to your images such as drop shadows, light boxes, and more Examine how a developer may use Views, Embedded Media Field, and other tools to make embedding video even easier Add and manipulate video at a field level using the File Field module Create thumbnail overlays with jQuery Create custom audio fields

Approach

This book will guide you through the steps necessary to add image, video, audio, and Flash elements into your Drupal sites. For each topic, you start with simple techniques and move on to more advanced techniques. By the time you've completed this book, you should have a firm ground from which to tackle most multimedia needs, and enough of an understanding to creatively solve more complex problems.

Who this book is written for?

This book will provide information for administrators and professional site developers who are required to embed multimedia into a Drupal site. The reader needs basic knowledge of Drupal operation, but no experience of how Drupal handles multimedia items is expected.

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