Customer Reviews

Drupal Multimedia

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having worked with Drupal for two years, I have reached the point where I need expert advice in order to continue to grow. Drupal is a bit like a forest with many paths running through it. You could spend all year trying each one and learning from experience, or you could get an experienced hand to point you in the right direction, especially if you cannot devote all your time to learning Drupal.

Aaron Winborn is experienced, knowledgeable, and helpful, if his writing at all reflects the man. The creator of the Embedded Media Field module, his has recognized expertise in configuring Drupal to handle multimedia content. In Drupal Multimedia, Winborn describes the state of Drupal multimedia support with one eye toward Drupal history and the other exploring the future. Context helps achieve deeper understanding.

For most of the book explains how to include images, video, and audio in Drupal sites. In these chapters, I found answers to questions I had been asking for a while. What felt right about the Image module (e.g., image galleries), and what needed fine-tuning to work better (e.g., WYSIWYG integration)? Winborn takes the reader from Image to Image Assist, Image Attach, and finally the TinyMCE DrupalImage button, the last of which had escaped me in my previous forays into online documentation and support forum discussions. I was only disappointed not to find an answer to another longstanding want: easy bulk image upload for end-users.

Winborn does not always take a single path through the forest. Often, he points out two or three different paths that might work well for your needs, while omitting mention of those that (I assume) he feels might not. After the comprehensive introduction to Image, Winborn changes approach. He describes how to use ImageField and ImageCache in conjunction with one's own custom content type. Comparing the two approaches not only helped me better understand how to structure my own approach but also provided an important insight into the Drupal ecosystem.

Winborn takes care not to blow his own horn too loudly. His creation, Embedded Media Field, plays third string behind other image solutions. The explanation is critical to integration with third-party media hosts such as Flickr and YouTube.

Winborn introduces the book as a "beginner to intermediate" Drupal resource while acknowleding the advanced nature of some examples. I thought this description was right on. A Drupal beginner would likely not be comfortable implementing some of the solutions provided, for example adding a preprocess hook to display the appropriate media player for an attached video. On the other hand, I found the emphasis on Node Reference essential for me to understand how to keep media items in their own nodes yet allow web pages to display them in the proper player.

Later in the book, Winborn takes a couple of thoughtful turns. He treats video before audio, upsetting the conventional order between them yet explicitly acknowledging the dominance of video these days. He also presents the embedded video field before addressing how to upload "local" video files. That also makes good sense to me, as I have quickly discovered how even a low-volume site benefits from hosting video at a specialized provider, such as Blip.tv.

Your perspective on the book may depend on your definition of "beginner" and "intermediate." I benefitted from both the high-level view and the relatively complex explanations. The book provided something to seek me teeth into and room for growth, which I imagine every Drupal developer needs. True beginners may quickly lose themselves in the details. Advanced users may not find the text sufficiently challenging.

Drupal Multimedia will remain an essential resource for me, due to its vertical treatment of key techniques. Yet, I also find myself wanting more almost immediately. Will DrupalImage reach production site quality for Drupal 6? How should I provide bulk image upload capability to end users? What will support and maintenance of these techniques look like a year from now? While I am glad to have added this book to my knowledge base, I have quickly followed up the read with more tinkering on a test site and surfing the discussion forums.

Richard Kassissieh is Director of Information Technology at Catlin Gabel School.
He writes on Drupal and other topics at http://kassblog.com

Drupal Multimedia

Drupal has had a great run in the book publishing arena these last few months. Drupal Multimedia is the latest book on the street. I really liked Drupal 6 Themes because it had a focus on something that was very important for an aspiring drupal ninja. Well now Drupal Multimedia is my latest favorite book. Aaron Winborn is truely an expert on the subject with the added bonus of being a good writer.

This book goes through Pictures, Video and Audio and discusses the modules to use, (including CCK and views) and how to get the output to look the way you want it. I was very happy to see that this book really goes in depth with the examples, this book has more examples of using theme function over-rides than I have seen in one place - more than just "breadcrumbs"!

The only negative I find with this book is the fact that some of the modules discussed are not available for Drupal Version 6. This is made very clear in the book -- and it is a function of when the book was written. The ones I checked still are not upgraded - certainly not the authors fault and a hazard of writing a book about a fast moving target.

Another thing unique about this "very hands on" with lots of examples book is that the author uses the last chapter of the book to make predictions about the future of Drupal. I like his predictions and hope they come true. He even makes "embedded smell field" seem like something that we really need ... you have to read it because it is for real.

I give this book two thumbs up!

<em>Drupal Multimedia</em>, by Aaron Winborn, Packt Publishing, 2008

<em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Drupal-Multimedia-Aaron-Winborn/dp/1847194605/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1242916032&sr=8-1">Drupal Multimedia</a></em> 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:

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

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.

This books provides an excellent overview of how to use Drupal for multimedia. It discusses how to incorporate images, video and sound into your Drupal site. In describes Drupal modules which can be used to manage each of these types of content. What is really nice about this book is that it clearly describes the differences between the modules and their strengths and weaknesses. Its comparison of Image and ImageField is particularly good. It also discusses the configuration options for the different modules. Another strength of this books is that is clearly outlines how to use CCK and Views to manage and display media.

One way in which this book excels over other books is the fact that this book goes into detail of how to customize Drupal template files to better handle media. One key set of customizations that the book discusses is how to embed media. Images can be embedded in a more usable fashion using the Lightbox module. The author also outlines how to use images as part of slideshows and galleries. A gallery function comes with the Image module. But the book delves deeper into galleries and show how to create them using Views, Taxonomies and the customization of templates.

Customizations can also be made to better display video files. Either those uploaded to the site or those from third party services such as Blip.tv, YouTube or JumpCut to name a few. Local videos can also be nicely displayed by using the jQuery Media module. This module takes a media link and wraps it in the appropriate media player. This works with both video and audio files.

Like images, audio has it own module. This or the File Field module can be used to add audio to Drupal. Another cool customization for sound files that the book discusses is how to allow users to create their own playlists.

This book is chock full of helpful tips on how to handle media within Drupal. It has terrific examples not only of administrative configuration but also relevant PHP needed to customize templates. Drupal is an extremely powerful platform but the accompanying documentation available is lacking, particularly for the most recent version (6.x). This book helps to fill in major gaps in the documentation available on the Drupal website. Additionally, it contains some of the most easy to read documentation I've been of customizing themes and templates.

The only downside of this book is the fact that several of the modules it recommends were still being updated for Drupal 6 at the time of publication. This means some of the directions and screenshots don't match the current interface exactly. Additionally, the following modules mentioned in the book still haven't been updated from Drupal 6.

* Acidfree Albums
* Image watermark
* jCarousel
* Magnifier
* Asset
* Media Mover
* XSPF Playlist Module

This aside though. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and learned SO much from it. I've been working with Drupal for about a year and learning as I go via books and hands on experience. This book gave me a much better sense of what Drupal is capable of in terms of media. I actually know where to start for a change. Additionally, I actually developed a useful understand themes and templates enough so I can make changes. If you want to incorporate media into your Drupal site I HIGHLY recommend this book.

This book is a great road map for Drupal users getting to know the multimedia terrain. As the author describes in this book, support for images, audio and video is not provided in the core release of Drupal 6 and the multimedia contributed module landscape is still pretty rocky. In spite of this fact, or simply because of it, the author has done an excellent job in presenting some of the best multimedia methods available to Drupal site developers.

Aaron Winborn is an expert and his contributions to the Drupal project are testaments to his knowledge and skill. He has written or contributed to many of the Drupal modules presented in this book and his experience with those methods is very clearly displayed. His biography section points out his experience teaching youth in classrooms and this shows through in the writing. I think many people will appreciate his presentation and style of teaching.

He covers methods for implementing image, audio and video presentation on Drupal sites in a couple of chapters. Here is what I appreciate most:

1. The book starts with an overview of the basic building blocks of Drupal. Readers of different levels are brought up to the same page before diving into the multimedia lessons.

2. Chapters build on knowledge acquired from previous chapters. Readers can wrap their heads around a system for handling images, for example, and then apply what they learned audio and video.

3. The author uses practical examples in each of the lessons made up of plausible scenarios and then outlines the shortest paths to the solutions. It's easy to identify with the lessons and visualize implementing them in the real world.

4. Highly technical material, such as writing custom functions and themes, are reserved for the later end of the chapters. Readers don't get bogged down with pages of example code until they have grasped the principles.

5. The modules he has chosen to represent the Drupal multimedia realm are among the strongest and most widely used solutions on the market. Readers will gain knowledge and vocabulary in methods that lots of other professionals are already using.

The only caution I might add here is that this certainly isn't a book for brand new Drupal users who don't come with some prior experience. The introductory chapters on the node system and content types only scrape the surface. To make the best use of the book's lessons, readers would be well advised to have some prior experience with Drupal's basics. If you haven't worked directly with the software yet, a good preread is "Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6", also published by Packt Publishing.

I really think the writing of this book also helps to shape the future of multimedia development in Drupal. Like a lot of open source projects, contributions from the community help build consensus while leadership and documentation like this book count doubly. These simple lessons describe not only how to use some great modules but also lay out a highly prevalent approach to multimedia development that is soon to become the standard.

Purchasing this and other Drupal books through the link below will give back some small amount of your purchase to the Drupal Association, a non-profit caretaker of the Drupal project: http://drupal.org/books

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).

You have a working Drupal 6 installation. You have some understanding of how to administer the site and add content. But, you would like to know how people do some interesting things with their Drupal sites that you can't quite figure out. Maybe that's adding images, or slide shows or photo galleries. Maybe that's pulling photos from outside sources like Flickr. Maybe you'd like to include YouTube videos or Odeo audio files or host video or audio on your own server. Maybe that's using some AJAX for various display effects. Oh, and you would like to know how the set your Drupal theme up so these things all look good automatically. This is your book.

Drupal Multimedia is a short book, 235 pages including preface and summary chapter, but it has absolutely no fluff. There's no rah-rah chapter explaining why Drupal is the greatest thing since buttered toast. There's no installation chapter. There is no space wasted explaining basic CSS or HTML. The author assumes that you already have a working Apache/PHP/MySQL environment and Drupal 6 installation, can add modules, and that you know a reasonable amount of web coding and that you won't freak out upon seeing instructions for some basic PHP tweaks. So if this sounds scary to you consider getting Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6 and working through that first. It's a more appropriate guide for the absolute beginner. But after you have the basics under your belt this is probably the best next book to get.

What the book does do is explain in cookbook style, how to add multimedia to Drupal using user contributed modules. It begins with two general purpose modules that add tremendous capabilities, the Content construction Kit (CCK) and the Views module. If you want to take Drupal beyond the basics these are important. Coverage of them is not extended but adequate, and you can see some of their more advanced capabilities through the examples given later in the book. Then the Image module is covered. I consider these three essential parts of any Drupal site and am glad that they get a good workout here.

The book then goes on to cover more specialized modules, explaining their use through examples that have legitimate real world application. A couple of the modules were written, at least in part, by Aaron Windburn and this book serves as a good user's guide to them. Listing the modules covered probably serves little purpose out of context, so I'll pass on that. There are also some CSS effects and some jQuery thrown in to spruce up your site.

As useful as this book is there are some small negatives. The index is only 5 pages long and only marginally worth the space. The table of contents on the publisher's site is more useful. I caught a couple of typos. Since the multimedia capabilities are all explained in the context of specific modules, you might not find the exact match for your situation. Though the coverage of media related modules is excellent.

Still, this is a very useful book, one that would have saved me many dozens of hours searching through forums and tutorials had I had it even six months ago, and has even provide a more straightforward solution to embedded video than I'd been using. It also has me rethinking a photo gallery I spent too many hours figuring out. I'm referring to in on a current project.

Drupal Multimedia will definitely take the beginning to intermediate Drupal developer or webmaster to a new level of competence and basic sites to a new level of sophistication.

Highly recommended

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.

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

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.