spam: the other white meat

I asked Jacob to start doing some integration of workflow support into Media Mover so that various triggers could be called from inside of Media Mover. We went back and forth between using Workflow and Workflow NG and ended up going with Workflow NG as it offered a much higher level of of sophistication.

Two modules have been incorporated into Media Mover- mm_token and mm_workflow_ng to do this integration. Tokens are provided from the mm_token module and the events are defined in mm_workflow_ng.

Currently things are in CVS, and you can track the issue here

I put together a module for Media Mover which allows some basic support for harvesting files from the local file system. It uses the same form that other Media Modules do- provides an absolute path to a directory and has a file extension filter. It currently does not work recursively, but it should be enough to provide the initial functionality.

Here you can see the options that the mm_dir module gives on a configuration screen:

The code is in CVS and will be released with the next Media Mover release.

See the discussion here: http://drupal.org/node/258956#comment-900776

UPDATE: now also supports storing to the filesystem as well.

The goals that I set out for the 1.0 release of Media Mover are drawing closer, and a surprising number of the tasks have actually be knocked off the list. I had originally hoped that the code would be stable by the beginning of this month, but I think the reality is that the 1.0 release is going to be pushed back to August 1st.

There are some big updates that are coming down the pipe for XSPF_Playlist that Nedjo is working on and I’m hoping that there can be a big media release at DrupalCon- perhaps that’s over reaching, but I’ll see where we go… FLVMediaplayer should be seeing some updates too, so that will help in the output.

The good news is, that in terms of functionality for Media Mover, we’re going to have major improvements for harvesting (email and ftp have gotten major updates), asset module integration, workflow ng integration, an import / export system, and a lot of under the hood improvements.

The main task I think is the documentation side of things. I’m going to be setting up handbook pages over the next few weeks that cover some of the basic tasks that people do with Media Mover.

One of the greatest things about the views project is that it is simple to create backups or move views from one site to another. It makes it really easy to entrust site administrators to develop complicated tools inside of Drupal without ever touching code. It’s also great for developers because we can put the views created by administrators of the site into code and actually keep track of critical views inside modules where things can be kept under version control.

Media Mover presents similar challenges for websites.You want to try out major changes before they go live- often on a different server or at least a different environment from your live one. You don’t want to bog down your server with extra processing until you know for sure you’ve got things right. Further, it gives you a chance to test out different configurations of processing to tweak the final output for your ends.

The problem however, is moving those configurations from one environment to another. It’s not that hard to do this by hand, but there is room for error, and doing lots of this can get tiresome very quickly.

I sat down this morning and started shelling out the import / export system for Media Mover. At the moment, it’s quite simple and doesn’t allow the defining of configurations in other modules, however, that should be fairly easy to implement. What it does do is straight forward exporting of an existing configuration and importing of the same configuration. The only real error checking that it does is to make sure that the same models are enabled on the import- this prevents some potentially nasty things from happening since there isn’t a whole lot of error checking once Media Mover starts processing.

The GUI is similar to views- clicking on the main export button gives you the options of which configurations to output, there is also a single link from the configuration landing page which directly exports that configuration.

That’s the extent of the export functionality. Once the user has the code, they can paste this code into the import textarea:

The code is basically the configuration object re-rendered in a textarea. Again, very similar to the approach taken by views:

In this final image, you can see the new view. I renamed it in the code so that it would have a new name on import just to make it obvious- by default this doesn’t happen, it’s just for demonstration purposes. If your’re interested in checking it out, take a peek at the DRUPAL-5 CVS branch. All the code is there.

This has to be one of the most fantastic rides in this part of Vermont. The descent from the top of Ap Gap into Buels Gore and down and what seems like endless down into Huntington Center, with Camel’s Hump up over your right shoulder. The road here is quiet for the most part and the pace is blistering. RT 2 is somewhat of a slog back, but there are some amazing vistas and if you can forget about I89, it really is a great ride.

I turned around rode Ap Gap again on Sunday- just can’t get enough of warm, sun, and Vermont

From North Montpelier to 10 miles south of Hardwick, Route 14 is a mess. However, it’s worth it if you’re heading north of Hardwick. The road and the views all along Route 16 are simply wonderful. Turned around at Barton to turn the harsh headwind into a tail wind, sailed all the way to Morrisville. Turned the corner and up over Elmore and back down to Montpelier.

RiseUp! has just announced their Freedom Summer of Code which seems ideally suited for developers who are interested in helping to develop code that both helps people and organizations to not depend on closed source code. For Drupal developer’s I think this could be a great way to develop and improve some functionality that is not dependent on third parties (ahem, Google).

The Freedom Summer of Code aims to advance critical movement technology projects and tools that benefit a wide-variety of radical social justice organizations and movements; inspire developers to become more interested in directly participating in social-justice tech organizations; contributes back, for the benefit of all, to the free software world which sustains us while simultaneously honoring individual’s labor; increases the social ownership and democratic control over information, ideas, technology, and the means of communication; empowers organizations and individuals to use technology in struggles for liberation. We are developing software that is geared specifically to the needs of network organizing and democratic collaboration, providing new services that greatly enhance your security and privacy.

They solliciting applications now, as well as additional donations to help the project along.