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.
About the Author
Aaron Winborn
Aaron Winborn has been developing websites since the mid-90s. Beginning as a freelancer while teaching at a Sudbury school (a democratic and age-mixed model for young people), his clients demanded more and more features, until he (like everyone and their grandmother) realized he had built a full-featured content management system that required more work to develop and maintain than he was able in his spare time.
He realized at some point that somewhere in the world of Open Source, someone had to have created and released something to the community. Of course, the wonderful news was Drupal.
After converting the existing sites of his clients to Drupal, he continued learning and began to contribute back to the community. About this time, Advomatic, a company with similar interests and a commitment to the Drupal community, began expanding beyond the initial partners who formed it in the wake of Howard Dean’s presidential campaign of 2004. Aaron realized that his own goals of creating great sites with a team would be better matched there, and he was hired as their first employee.
Since that time, he has helped to develop some excellent sites, with clients such as Air America Radio, TPM Cafe, NRDC, Greenopia, Mountain News, Viacom, and Bioneers. He has also contributed several modules to Drupal, mostly stemming from his work with multimedia, including Embedded Media Field (for third-party Video, Audio, and Images), Views Slideshow (to create slide shows out of any content), and the RPG module (for online gaming, still in progress).
Book Details
- Paperback: 264 pages
- Publisher: Packt Publishing; 1st edition (October 30, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1847194605
- ISBN-13: 978-1847194602
- File Size: 17.1 MiB
- Hits: 1,382 times
