Drupal Media Initiative Gathering Momentum

Last Thursday, lead by Dave Reid, we held the first Media Initiative meeting and Office Hours in the #drupal-media IRC channel. It was a great success with more than 60 people joining in. Here is a short summary of what was discussed:

• Dave opened the meeting, welcomed everyone and he and the other present members (Aaron Winborn, Gus Austin, Arthur Foelsche and Thomas Svenson) of the Media Initiative gave a short introduction about themselves.
• Dave then gave a recap of the status of Media, mentioning the successful Media Sprint held back in September. It meant a real push forward for media in Drupal and a lot where accomplished.
• The sprint also meant an informal "unofficial" Media Initiative was started, taking inspiration from the Drupal 8 Core Initiatives. The goal is to get improved media management into Drupal 8, as well as help creating better communication and collaboration for the media support needed for Drupal 7. Dave volunteered to become the unofficial lead of this initiative for the time being and have done a great job thus far.
• Media v1.x has feature freeze and will only receive bug fixes. New features goes into the 2.x branch.
• Many of the present people agreed that for Drupal 8, the goal should be to get the File Entity module into core. Full entity and field-able files would provide a very strong base for media management.
• Consensus was high about that the Media module needs to live in contrib until it is mature and ready for core. It will allow it to evolve much more than what the restrictions in core would allow.
• We also discussed the forming of a Media Bug Squad to help out in the issue queues, using the success of the Views Bug Squad as inspiration. Thomas Svenson agreed to take on the role of coordinating that. Several people quickly voiced their interest with helping out with the bug squad.
• Dave also mentioned that he is working on organizing a new Media Code Sprint at DrupalCon in Denver end of March. He is still waiting for an answer from the organizers if that is possible.
• Meeting ended with the announcement of that the next will happen February 2nd.

Full transcript of the meeting can be read at pastie.org.

Many small discussions where spawned during the meeting, showing that there is a broad interest and engagement within the community to help with pushing media in Drupal forward.

The office hours started and spawned even more discussions. Collaboration amongst the users started immediately and resulted in not only several new issues filed, but also work on new patches to fix bugs or add needed features. Several users expressed that they where very impressed with the work already been done and that they are now going to be participating much more active.

It is safe to say that the this first official meeting did achieve its goal to push momentum forward. I am sure that we will see a lot happen with media in Drupal from now on. Its really exciting times to be involved with everything.

Resources to keep you updated and involved

• The Media module project page
• The File Entity project page
• Join the Media on groups.drupal.org
• Follow @DrupalMedia on Twitter
• Bookmark drupalmedia.org where "something" is planned to happen
• Sign up to the next meeting so you wont miss it

I am shortly going to create a wiki page in the Media group about the bug squad. So keep an eye out there if you are interested of helping out.

I will of course also keep posting about Media here on Drupal Mill and have a few other exiting things planned that I hope to start soon. So keep watching this space to be updated.

Bonus Video

At Drupal Down Under in Melbourne last week, James Gollan had a session called Media savvy: Adding media to your Drupal site. James gave a great overview of what the Media project currently is and what you can do with it. Its a great introduction for you to get up to speed with it.