Handling Media Assets in Drupal

Websites and software systems are constantly getting highly interactive and user-centric. In today’s times, media handling has become a vital component of any software system. Media handling is what has helped Drupal become a preferred choice for building various different kind of systems may it be E-Commerce, Social Networking, Showcase Websites, Company Intranet Solution or any other.

Numerous companies from the industries of Media, E-Learning, Journalism, and Community Portals use Drupal and all of their sites are media rich in terms of videos, pictures, music, document files etc.

Hence media initiative has been taken very seriously by the Drupal community and there are various modules available which strengthen Drupal to be able to handle media exceptionally well.

About Media Project Initiative

Drupal community has had a focused team that has been working to improve media handling in Drupal since 2011. Ever since many media based modules have been created, many issues have been resolved which has now enabled the users to have the capability to add an extensive framework to the Drupal site to create media assets, upload them, manage them in a gallery and use them in various different types of content. Especially after the introduction of entities in Drupal 7, a lot of significant development was done in the media handling and hence using media in Drupal eventually became much more user-friendly and intuitive.

Highlights on how Drupal’s extensive module library ensures easy media handling

Some of the many modules that ensure that using media in Drupal content becomes easier have been listed below. With the help of these modules it becomes easy to add media/files as a field while defining the structure of a type of content, i.e. media and files become fieldable.

Also, with the help of these modules, media becomes a part of the WYSIWYG editor which makes it easy to add media in various different types of content while adding text using the editor. Also, media widget ensures that the method of adding media is not only standard but also user-friendly.

Some of the modules that enhance Drupal’s media handling capabilities are as follows

• Media
• Scald
• Colorbox
• Gallery formatter
• Media Carousal
• File Entity
• Embedded Media Field

Adding third-party media files and video players to Drupal site

Apart from the media capabilities talked above, it is also possible to add media files i.e. video, image and audio files from various third-party providers. So, in Drupal, it is also possible to add media from other services such as YouTube, MySpace, MetaCafe, Daily Motion, Last.fm, Yahoo Music Video, Soundcloud etc.

Also, there are numerous video players that are available and can easily be embedded in Drupal. Moreover, more than one custom players also can easily be managed in Drupal. These players can easily be themed to match the look and feel of the site and also the player specific variables such as width, height, skin, auto-play etc. can easily be configured. Some of the players that are integrated into Drupal easily are as follows

• JPlayer
• JWPlayer
• Flow Player
• Video.js

Originally written at Faichi’s blog.

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