Media and file management

As weblogs and community sites have shifted into the mainstream, we're beginning to see the rise of multimedia publishing. Image galleries and photo blogging are becoming increasingly popular. We'll take a look at what's new in Drupal for handling images, then look ahead toward expanded support for other types and formats.

Participants

• James Walker (organizer)
• Marc Canter

The New Image API

Drupal 4.6 will feature a new Image API for doing basic image manipulations. Included are patches to automatically resize user pictures and upload.module attached images to administer specified dimensions. But, what's next? How can your module make use of the API and why does it matter?

Native Support for More Media Types

As image support continues to grow, what about other types of media, such as audio and video? What about flash games or other interative media? What is common about handling these media types? How can we efficiently address the specific needs, requirements, etc of each specific format?

Dealing with files

Multimedia formats are typically binary files and, thus, best handled by Drupal's file.inc API. However, upload.module (for attaching files to nodes) can also be used to manage media files. How can we make use of or integrate additional media types with upload.module? When does it make sense to introduce file-based nodes? How can we efficiently handle them?