Spam: The other white meat

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.

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