New book from Aaron, the creator of the awesome Embedded Media field for Drupal. It's a great module, I've used it for embedding videos on many sites. I contributed to Vimeo support.

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Product Description

Information for Drupal administrators and site developers on all aspects of multimedia in Drupal. 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.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #285143 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-25
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

About the Author
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).

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Customer Reviews

incomplete and poorly organised
If you have your first basic Drupal install it can feel pretty daunting when you have to think about adding multimedia content. Despite its title, I'm afraid this book didn't really help. It mentions a number of different Drupal modules that might be installed without making it clear what each one does, and it becomes far too easy to be convinced that you should install more modules than you need without adequate guidance on how to join them together. Despite being slightly coy on the subject, the book promotes the author's own module as a solution, even though it's not exactly bug-free.

The book spends far too long on explaining how great Drupal is and how to install it, and a little time with irrelevant speculation on future developments, but it assumes that multimedia means pictures, video and audio content and does not expand on this rather limited view. In particular, flash is hardly mentioned at all and jquery is not dealt with sufficiently.

The index is also very poorly constructed, making the whole thing feel imprecise and ramshackle because it becomes difficult to find even basic multimedia topics handled in a straightforward way or even within a coherent structure.

There are many video tutorials on the web (such as from Drupal Therapy or YouTube) that will get you up and running in less time and for no money.

Drupal Multimedia Review
The Drupal Multimedia book , gives a good overview of both Images, Audio and Vidio and dares to think beyond current MultiMedia. With a zillion possible modules to choose from when starting to build a Drupal site it is often difficult too find the best module for a task, different modules have similar functionalities and features. Aaron saves you the trouble of figuring out which modules are suited best for what task by discussing. For each media type he discusses which module fits best. However , sometimes he opted to discuss a Drupal 5 module that wasn't ported yet to Drupal 6, so you might have to seek for alternatives depending on your Drupal version.

For one of my sites I used the Flickr module that now seems to be outdated, the book pointed me to the Embedded Media Module , so the book was well worth the time spent with it and I`ll have all of my drupal Hacking collegues read it, as it will save them time figuring out which modules to use.

Great resource!
Drupal has attracted a lot of attention for the book authors during the last couple of years. A lot of books for the popular CMS have been published, with content targeted from beginners to advanced users, ranging from end users to core and third-party module programmers.

My new Drupal book arrived about three weeks ago. "Drupal Multimedia" was written by Aaron Winborn and is published by Packt Publishing, a house that has published a variety of books targeting Drupal, Joomla, PHP, etc. The book is targeted to users that want to learn how to unleash the multimedia features of Drupal with the use of third party modules. It's targeted mainly to intermediate and advanced users. Beginners could find their way through it, although they will probably find the content regarding theming somewhat confusing (because of their little knowledge of the Drupal inner mechanism and not because of the way the book is written).

Chapter 1 starts with a quick introduction to Drupal and meanings such as nodes, regions, blocks, themes, and a couple of widely used third-party modules, like Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views. These two modules are heavily used through the rest of the book and are modules that a professional Drupal site cannot live without.

Chapter 2 goes through the process of creating new image nodes, with the power of the Image module. It demonstrates the creation of galleries, the embedding of images using Image Assist and the author makes an introduction to WYSIWYG modules (TinyMCE in this case) that are tied with the previously mentioned image modules.

Chapter 3 starts exploring other possibilities of attaching and displaying images in nodes, with the use of CCK and third-party modules built around it. In this case, the ImageField module is used. In the remainder of the chapter, the author explains the use of ImageCache for cropping, resizing and scaling images, Embedded Media Field for embedding images from third-party hosting sites like Flickr or Picasa and Taxonomy Image for displaying certain images for each vocabulary term. The first attempt for theming is done at this chapter.

Chapter 4 is dedicated to theming images. The reader will learn how to theme a view using CSS, how to discover which theming method to override by using Firefox's extension Firebug and Drupal's third-party Theme Developer Module. CSS will be used to demonstrate the creation of roll-over menus and images with the drop shadow effect. A small introduction will be done for the LightBox, Magnifier, Five Star and jCarousel modules at the end of the chapter.

Chapter 5 deals with video hosted in third-party providers, like YouTube, Metacafe, etc. The author uses the previously mentioned Embedded Media Field to present videos not hosted on the same server that runs Drupal.

Chapter 6 deals with video hosted locally. For this purpose, the FileField CCK module is used. The author also mentions players that are Flash based and introduces jQuery Media, which is a wrapper module for the jQuery Media Plugin.

Chapter 7 deals with the concept of file management. The CCK included Node Reference module is demonstrated, along with an example of how to theme a node referenced video. Then, the author talks about the Asset and Media Mover modules, which are basically APIs that each implement the concept of file management in different ways. A few basic examples that illustrate some of the functionality of these powerful modules follow.

Chapter 8 is about audio nodes. There is a small introduction of the most widely used audio formats in the internet (wav, mp3, ogg). Then, the author goes through the Audio Module, the module that is for audio files what the Image Module is for images. However, because audio files are not something that are natively handled by browsers like images or text, the author talks about audio players that are mainly Flash based. The Audio module ships with two Flash players that can play most audio formats.

Chapter 9 goes deeper in the audio territory, by examining the FileField module for audio files. As in the case for images, FileField is a CCK module that with the help of jQuery Media, you can create audio fields with a Flash based embedded media player. External audio sources can be handled by utilizing the Embedded Audio Field, which is a module contained in Embedded Media Field.

In chapter 10, the author goes through the process of theming for audio content. The reader will discover techniques with the Node Reference CCK module and how to create playlists with the help of the XSPF XML file format, XSPF Playlist and Views modules.

Finally, chapter 11 takes a look at what the future brings. Drupal 7, which is currently under heavy development, will carry a hook_file() function, that will implement a file API, that all modules will take advantage. Hopefully, a new generation of multimedia modules will use the new mechanism. It's been discussed before that parts of the CCK module and the Image module will be merged into the Drupal core, meaning that there's a pretty good chance that modules like FileField and ImageField will exist in core. From all this, everybody wins, since the third-party developers won't have to reinvent the wheel every time they need a file API and they can focus on better usability, like a better UI and better documentation.

Overall, this is a book where the author aggregates knowledge that you find scattered in the drupal.org pages (handbook, forum, etc.) regarding the multimedia aspects of a Drupal site. So, it's a very good source to use in order to create multimedia rich sites. Reading through this book, I discovered a lot of stuff I didn't know about. The theming part is a tricky thing, which needs more documentation and experience in order to achieve the results that you need. The book is focused around Drupal 6, although there were a few modules that (by the time the book was published) had not been ported yet to 6. Still the author makes references on them, hoping that a port for 6 will have been done by today. The book will not teach you how to write your own modules, but it will teach you how to take advantage of the existing variety of third-party modules. Hopefully, Drupal 7 will bring a new era for multimedia handling techniques. Until then, you can buy this book and take advantage of what's already there. If you don't want to search through the drupal.org site, the documentation (which can probably be outdated) and the forum topics in order to create your multimedia site, then this book is highly recommended.