Spam: The other white meat

Media Mover 2's S3 implementation now supports private files hosted on Amazon. You can set access to files by role- with the obvious exception of the anonymous user. Links to each file expire after a set amount of time which gives site administrators a degree of control for providing protected content.

Here are the slides from the Media Module panel. No additional cats were harmed in the creation of this pdf.

With folks using Media Mover to transcode larger and larger video files, cron time outs have become somewhat of a problem as Drupal waits for FFmpeg to complete its processing. With Media Mover one, configurations are run from cron by default (not required, but out of the box) which means that cron runs as long as the Media Mover configuration takes. While it is possible to limit cron runs, the reality of transcoding a gigabyte file is that it takes time regardless of how much horsepower you can throw at it. Media Mover one was setup to be friendly to multi-machine systems, but the system left some things to be desired.

The S3 module for Media Mover just got updated to make the CDN integration easier. As files come through the system, files which already reside on S3 will have $file->s3_uri set which allows theming functions to display the local URI if it is present or the S3 URI if the file is already on S3.

Make that $file->s3_data which is a serialized array of data from the S3 file. This allows for the generation of private urls.

With Media Mover 2 having significantly changed its architecture, the possibility to import and export data has gotten much more interesting. Because Media Mover's configurations now are mostly containers for steps which define the actual things that happen to files, it is possible to export and import both full configurations and individual steps. This is helpful for example if you are tweaking your video conversion process on your development server and then you can export the tweaked settings to your production environment. Mark Sonnabaum has been leading the way getting the integration with CTools done so that there is a familiar interface for getting data in and out.

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.