Welcome back to the ninth day of Drupal Advent Calendar, and behind today’s door we find the Media track of Drupal Starshot. Media Management is an area where Drupal has traditionally not been strong compared to other content management systems, yet it has a lot of very powerful features that Drupal CMS will hopefully refine to make it one of the best media management platforms on the web.
In the Track Leads keynote at DrupalCon Barcelona, Tony Barker, the Track Lead for Media Management in Drupal CMS, outlined how he is building the track to help marketers tell their story and connect with their audience using media in Drupal CMS; to reduce friction for editors in the UI; and to have great performing media to help achieve high metrics when measuring with tools like Lighthouse.
Those plans are coming to life as the first versions of the Media Management recipes have in the last few weeks been merged into Drupal CMS.
There is a focus on the most commonly used media type, images, with cropping made effortless for editors with Focal Point module and the inclusion of an SVG image media type made possible by SVG image module.
The Drupal CMS image recipe contains pre-configured responsive image styles for commonly used aspect ratios, each connected to a media view mode so they can be used when configuring content displays and views. These are available out of the box to editors using CKEditor media embedding.
The remote video media type from core receives an enhancement with small, medium and large resizing available to editors that respects the aspect ratio of the embedded videos. A feature from the Privacy track respects the user’s preferences by blocking video from third party providers if consent has not been given to load them.
The track is working on adjustments and some front-end enhancements ahead of the launch of Drupal CMS 1.0 in January and then will turn its attention to adding and improving features, with opportunities outlined in the Media Management Vision issue.
We are really looking forward to seeing what Drupal CMS brings to media management, both in the initial release in January, and as it develops in subsequent releases.
Edit: If you’d like to learn more about the Media track, Tony talks about it in the latest edition of the Talking Drupal podcast.
Tony Barker (tonypaulbarker) is a Front-end Specialist with Annertech from Northumberland, UK. He is the Media Management Track Lead for Starshot.
Left: a festive image of Tony with his wife Sophie, who assisted with populating the many configuration files for Responsive Image Styles in the first version of the Drupal CMS Image recipe.
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