Multiple media management modules in Drupal 7
In Drupal 7, the Media project tried to solve all media problems in one single module. As a result it was in permanent transition and never completed. There were countless additional and alternative modules for media management. Some of them were better and more powerful than others but the situation was not satisfying. Unfortunately, most Drupal site builders and agencies tended to create highly custom solutions instead of working with the maintainers to improve the media ecosystem.
Media Initiative: Cleanup media situation
For Drupal 8, a group of developers founded the Media Initiative in 2013. They planned to use multiple components instead of one module to clean up the media situation.
But the estimated workload seemed to be too big and the progress was slow. At the time of the Drupal 8 core release, people were frightened by the limited maturity of media management features and by the unknown date of availability.
MD Systems took the lead and developed a strategy to change that situation for Drupal 8. We mobilized companies (Somedia, Gassmann Media, Ringier), agencies (Wondrous, Ueberbit, etc.) and several Drupal developers to support our project. By pushing the Media Initiative with our Media Initiative Program shortly after the official release of Drupal 8, we could kickstart the project before the fragmentation of the media ecosystem began.
Ready to use for Drupal 8
Within 4 months we have reached what didn’t happen during the previous 5 years. Now, there is a solid base that is ready to use and contains all relevant features that are widely used. The program helped the Media Initiative to gain global momentum and many people from the community are actively participating in further development.
Based on the Media Initiative you can now:
- Browse through your media files of your website (Entity Browser, Filebrowser)
- Embed files in the WYSIWYG editor by browsing (Entity Embed)
- Add and edit asset metadata (Media entity, File Entity)
- Crop images on the website (Crop, Imagefield Crop)
- Add image effects like watermark, auto orientation, color-shift etc. (Image Effects)
- And use many more features...
You can find more detailed information about that in the blog of Janez .
MD Systems as a major driver
We are sure that numerous Drupal sitebuilders and end users will enjoy the media projects for a long time and we are proud to be a major driver for developing such a project in an early state of the new Drupal version.
Watch our presentation about the completion of the program.
