Drupal Multimedia review

Although this book was published in last November, I had no time to read it till now. Since Drupal 7 won’t come out before the end of 2009, the things that can be read in this book will be current for a long time. Aaron Winborn, the author of the book (who is the developer a bunch of media modules for Drupal) helps you to manage your media files in a uniform way, but shows different methods to arrive at a solution.

The book starts with an overview of Drupal, CCK, Views, and theming. Here and in the rest of the book you can see a lot of screenshots to help you understand what you read. The most of the book is about Drupal 6 but Aaron talks about Drupal 5 too where there are differences or there was no Drupal 6 solution at the time of writing. You learn about using modules and than about theming the result.

Chapters 2–4 are about images. For example you learn about Image, ImageField, ImageCache etc. modules but there is not a word about the famous IMCE. Aaron wrote that Image Assist allowed more flexibility, IMCE provided no theme functions and the development and maintenance of Image Assist seemed to be more active than that of IMCE.

You find video in the chapters 5–7. You learn about third party videos and EmField (chapter available for free download from Packt), local videos and FileField, assets and Node reference, Asset, Media Mover etc. Aaron writes here about drupalmultimedia.org which should show all the examples of the book. Unfortunately the site has not been finished up to the time of writing this review and there are only a few videos there. It might have happened because he was busy making a Drupal YouTube clone for the Do It With Drupal seminar and because he could also have been busy developing the general Media module. However it is sad (and a little bit strange, because he had done this work one time when he made the screenshots).

Chapters 8-10 are about audio. You start with a simple audio content (Audio module) and end with user generated playlists. You can read here about a complex solution, which uses XSPF and view in view.

In the last chapter Aaron writes about the possible future of Drupal. This chapter maybe a bit longer than it should be.
All in all I found this book to be a lovely guide to using multimedia in Drupal 6. It is practical and helps you find the right solution. Recommended.

You can find information, code, errata, free chapter etc. at the Drupal Multimedia page of Packt Publishing.