Spam: The other white meat

Media Mover 2.x has been slowly creeping along for the last bunch of months and is starting to approach an alpha state. One of the cool things about Media Mover 2 is that the architecture has been rewritten from the ground up. Now there are three main concepts - files that Media Move knows about, configurations which are a collection of steps, and steps which are settings for some kind of action or process that is done to a file. However, they all have lives of their own which means you can do some neat things with them.

Let's imagine that you have a module that needs to do some kind of file processing that Media Mover already supports. You can define a step- that is, a set of settings - much like a view - in code in your module. You can then invoke it simply:

Alexandru Badiu just emailed me to let me know that he has released a new YouTube module that allows files to be stored to YouTube from a standard Media Mover configuration. Awesome!

For folks who need imagecache conversions to be automated, the dev version of Media Mover 6 has a new module which will create all of the imagecache presets that are select for Media Mover files. This makes it easy to to push the derivatives to a CDN service without relying on users to hit the URL for the imagecache file. Hooray!

Progress, progress, progress. Lots of backend improvements. UI is getting better. Hopefully going to be seeing some new content from Aaron in the form of YouTube shortly. Hooray! Checkout the screencast for the full details

This past summer, Packt Publishing was kind enough to send me a copy of Drupal 6 Content Administration by J. Ayen Green. Having told clients "hey, you wanted a complicated website, why do you think it's going to be easy to administer?" way to many times, I've been awaiting a book to provide an introduction to Drupal which covers some of the key- and not so obvious- aspects in a short read.

Despite having been a Drupal developer for several years, I still find myself scratching my head at supposedly mundane tasks (what recipe is best for uploading files with a WYSIWYG editor for example). A book that can walk through day to day site administration tasks is a fantastic resource, especially for folks are on unfamiliar ground.

In the last round I showed a proof of concept. This time we're moving rapidly toward something functional- we've got a browser actually attached to a filefield, a pseudo UI, a much clearer idea of where our direction needs to go, and some eye candy. Checkout the screencast!

This quick video shows some of the progress that was made at the NYC Media Sprint last week. While it departs from some of the earlier mockups that we did this past spring, this is functional in terms of browsing and is quite a bit better thought through- thanks to all the smart folks sitting around the table.

I worked with MotherJones to produce a Drupal application that lets users create their own versions of the latest MotherJones cover. MotherJones wanted users to be able to upload their own photos and overlay a cover of their choice and add some text to the final image.

One of the funny things about getting Drupal coders together in a room is that in my experience, more often than not, you get a whole lot less code than you would expect. What you do seem to get however are high level converstations about architecture, implementation, and user experience.

Hard at work in the Mansueto offices