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:

Frost posted some nice documentation on FLV Media Player

beksau posted a really helpful tutorial on how to integrate mobile technology (eg: mobile phones) with Media Mover to create an automatic transcoding system for posted content. Beksau's process uses mailhandler as a standalone rather than integrating directly with Media Mover, but from my perspective, it just showcases the fact that you can make very creative systems for handling content- Media Mover is flexible enough to plug in to what you are already using.

As I've been working on getting the 6.2x branch of Media Mover up and running, I've started going through the old code and cleaning up the Doxygen documentation so that my own documentation effort is a bit cleaner. I'm now generating daily snapshots of all three branches here: doxy documentation

UPDATED

After some consideration and discussion with Robin I think my first go at hook_media_mover is off the mark. Using hook_menu as the template, I think the process of defining media mover actions can be simplified:

function mm_node_media_mover() {
  $items = array();
  $items['set_node_status'] = array(
    'description' => t('Set node status'),
    'configuration' => 'mm_node_config_complete',
    'callback' => 'mm_node_complete',
  );
  return $items;
}

$items[NAME] identifies the specific action. The individual items for each action- description, configuration, callback, harvest provide information about what to do with this action.

In an attempt to improve the workflow of Media Mover, I'm going through the process of refining the main API aspect. The main reason for this is to move away from the 4 step model (harvest, process, store and complete) to a chainable set of definable actions.

These are some notes to self as I'm going through the process, but feedback is of course appreciated

function hook_media_mover() {
  return array(
    '#name' => t('My Media Mover module description'),
    '#actions' => array(
      array(
        // give each action in your module a unique id 
        '#action' => 'operation_1',
        // give your action a description
        '#description' => t('Do something with a file!'),
        // harvesting files is a special case. You only need

Mail support has been missing from the Media Mover 6.x version since I started development on it. I've finally gotten around to connecting it to (formally)Moshe's and z.stolar great Mailhandler module.

I've added a few pieces of functionality beyond the 5.x version. Email accounts are validated on a configuration creation, and a test is offered to make sure that your configuration can connect to the server.

I'm going to be sprinting on Media Mover and giving a talk at the Open Media Camp on Media Mover as well.

The Open Media Camp is being held April 18th-19th and looks like is going to break quite a bit of ground on media issues in Drupal.

Using the Antiword program, Media Mover now has its first text converter. Antiword can take Microsoft doc files and convert them to pdf, ps, and txt files, giving site admins the ability to get rid of those pesky MS files- or at least provide alternate formats.

For sites that have a number of doc files already on the site, Media Mover can batch convert these for you. For sites that want all uploaded files to be in the same format, Antiword gives you a good way to have your users files converted.

Brian from Civic Pixel just let me know that he put together the Media Mover Remove module. In a nutshell, the module helps reduce file cruft by deleting extra files that were creating during a Media Mover run. You can find out about the use case that spurred this functionality.