Drupal 7 Media by Liran Tal

Having read through Drupal 7 media, I can honestly say I am quite impressed.

For once a book like this doesn't start with the obligatory chapter on installing and setting up drupal, quite a refreshing change, but instead leads off with an explanation on nodes and entities and then focuses on setting up a content type for dealing with media using the image handling features that come with drupal by default, including an introduction to display modes. This provides a nice overview of some of the new stuff available in drupal 7 when compared to drupal 6.

This quickly gives way to another introductory type chapter covering blocks and views and themes, also necessary stuff for getting a more fully featured website up and running and so definitely worth a mention.

With these out the way this book starts getting into some of the more complicated stuff to get your head around and introduces the media module covering some standard installation settings that can be troublesome if you haven't explored them before. Those readers of some of the other packt titles may recognise the recipes website example that is utilised to carry this book through the story of website creation, but it is used again here to provide an example of what the media module and some of its associated expansion modules can do, including how to use remote media assets, providing integration with the WYSIWYG module and setting up an image galleries.

There are also similar chapters covering video and audio content, in equal depth providing an all-round understanding of the current media support and if including media on your own website is something you are currently looking into and struggling with, then this book will definitely get you to the point where you are implement a few of the options available.

If this wasn't reason enough to purchase this book there is more. There is a couple of chapters devoted to the new features available using html5, one chapter a brief introduction to HTML5 including the media support now provided by browsers supporting these features and also a section on how to implement canvas in drupal. The other HTML 5 chapter covers RDFa and Microdata, charting using the visualisation thanks to the enhanced js support of HTML5 and a nice introduction of responsive design. I do feel, however there is a missing section here, that being some of the ways to introduce responsive images and other media would have been a nice addition here and is something I feel is sorely missed.

The other chapter not mentioned so far is regarding enhance the media provision and cover image styles, a lightbox using the colorbox module and introducing a rating system. It covers these in quite an in depth manner and provides some nice enhancements including so more WYSIWYG enhancements to improve the user experience.

One of my initial reactions to this book was that it has come quite late in the release cycle for Drupal 7 and it would have been very welcomed a couple of years ago, although the media support of drupal7 has been quite a rollercoaster since its introduction, having said that it came as little surprise that the final chapter is an introduction to Drupal 8, even though it's not specifically media related.

Overall this book provides a good overall coverage of media handling in Drupal 7, albeit a late offering, I think it can still provide some use until Drupal 8 and the required modules to deliver reliable media support is available as the media module has only recently settled down and become a realiable goto tool in the drupal arsenal.

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