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Drupal Multimedia | 
| Author: Aaron Winborn
Publisher: Packt Publishing
Category: Book
List Price: $39.99
Buy New: $35.00
You Save: $4.99 (12%)
New (15) Used (4) from $35.00
Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 219190
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st
Pages: 264
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.5 x 0.7
ISBN: 1847194605
Dewey Decimal Number: 005
EAN: 9781847194602
ASIN: 1847194605
Publication Date: October 30, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Information for Drupal administrators and site developers on all aspects of multimedia in Drupal. This book will provide information for administrators and professional site developers who are required to embed multimedia into a Drupal site. The reader needs basic knowledge of Drupal operation, but no experience of how Drupal handles multimedia items is expected.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Good for absolute beginners December 27, 2008
Victor Didra (Philippines)
For anyone that has done any work with Drupal, I cannot recommend Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Winborn.
Developers new to Drupal will find a handy place to start when working with images, audio and video. The book serves as a very basic introduction to specific Drupal modules handling these different content types.
Most developers that have spent very much time on Drupal will not find this book nearly as useful though. The most important knowledge in this book could be condensed down into a nice list of modules ideal for specific tasks.
The majority of the book goes through configuration and use of these particular modules. There isn't anything advanced here, it really is just a hand holding exercise for those who are having a difficult time going through basic module setup.
Don't look here for anything useful in the theming or module development areas either. The few short forays into deeper water are all very basic and not very useful to seasoned developers. If you're a beginner, none of this is explained well enough to be applied to other, similair problems.
In summary, I can only recommend this book to you if you are an absolute beginner who has no intention to do any theming or module development for some time. For everyone else, my current recommendation is Pro Drupal Development, Second Edition (Beginning from Novice to Professional).
Well Written and to the Point. December 25, 2008
P. Warren (Charlotte, NC USA)
Drupal multimedia and multimedia capable web sites has been an interest of mine for a while now and this book helped me to focus my efforts, select from the more popular modules and even presented some alternates. I even went as far as revisiting possible Drupal WYSIWYGs to use as I had been using the simple user interface up till now. Now I have multiple Content Types, some for using TinyMCE and more advance tagging (HTML tagging not social tagging) of content, and the others use the simple user interface with no tagging at all. For me it's all about having choices.
This is definitely not a Drupal book for beginners, I'd say intermediates or better; you have to be comfortable moving through a Drupal site via administrator menus, checking module dependencies and reading up on and through existing module documentation on the Drupal site to get it all to work right.
I also liked the alignment with other popular modules such as CCK (which a book could be written for alone), jQuery Media, Asset and Media Mover.
And finally code. Small short and simple PHP code snippets (that you can download) that help or enhance are always welcome, as well as explanations of what results they will produce. Not about feeding someone's ego, but practical and useful.
Strikes a great path in the multimedia landscape! December 10, 2008
Sean Effel
This book is a great road map for Drupal users getting to know the multimedia terrain. As the author describes in this book, support for images, audio and video is not provided in the core release of Drupal 6 and the multimedia contributed module landscape is still pretty rocky. In spite of this fact, or simply because of it, the author has done an excellent job in presenting some of the best multimedia methods available to Drupal site developers.
Aaron Winborn is an expert and his contributions to the Drupal project are testaments to his knowledge and skill. He has written or contributed to many of the Drupal modules presented in this book and his experience with those methods is very clearly displayed. His biography section points out his experience teaching youth in classrooms and this shows through in the writing. I think many people will appreciate his presentation and style of teaching.
He covers methods for implementing image, audio and video presentation on Drupal sites in a couple of chapters. Here is what I appreciate most:
1. The book starts with an overview of the basic building blocks of Drupal. Readers of different levels are brought up to the same page before diving into the multimedia lessons.
2. Chapters build on knowledge acquired from previous chapters. Readers can wrap their heads around a system for handling images, for example, and then apply what they learned audio and video.
3. The author uses practical examples in each of the lessons made up of plausible scenarios and then outlines the shortest paths to the solutions. It's easy to identify with the lessons and visualize implementing them in the real world.
4. Highly technical material, such as writing custom functions and themes, are reserved for the later end of the chapters. Readers don't get bogged down with pages of example code until they have grasped the principles.
5. The modules he has chosen to represent the Drupal multimedia realm are among the strongest and most widely used solutions on the market. Readers will gain knowledge and vocabulary in methods that lots of other professionals are already using.
The only caution I might add here is that this certainly isn't a book for brand new Drupal users who don't come with some prior experience. The introductory chapters on the node system and content types only scrape the surface. To make the best use of the book's lessons, readers would be well advised to have some prior experience with Drupal's basics. If you haven't worked directly with the software yet, a good preread is "Building Powerful and Robust Websites with Drupal 6", also published by Packt Publishing.
I really think the writing of this book also helps to shape the future of multimedia development in Drupal. Like a lot of open source projects, contributions from the community help build consensus while leadership and documentation like this book count doubly. These simple lessons describe not only how to use some great modules but also lay out a highly prevalent approach to multimedia development that is soon to become the standard.
Purchasing this and other Drupal books through the link below will give back some small amount of your purchase to the Drupal Association, a non-profit caretaker of the Drupal project: http://drupal.org/books
 Provides both helpful context and practical details November 30, 2008
Richard Kassissieh (Portland, OR USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Having worked with Drupal for two years, I have reached the point where I need expert advice in order to continue to grow. Drupal is a bit like a forest with many paths running through it. You could spend all year trying each one and learning from experience, or you could get an experienced hand to point you in the right direction, especially if you cannot devote all your time to learning Drupal.
Aaron Winborn is experienced, knowledgeable, and helpful, if his writing at all reflects the man. The creator of the Embedded Media Field module, his has recognized expertise in configuring Drupal to handle multimedia content. In Drupal Multimedia, Winborn describes the state of Drupal multimedia support with one eye toward Drupal history and the other exploring the future. Context helps achieve deeper understanding.
For most of the book explains how to include images, video, and audio in Drupal sites. In these chapters, I found answers to questions I had been asking for a while. What felt right about the Image module (e.g., image galleries), and what needed fine-tuning to work better (e.g., WYSIWYG integration)? Winborn takes the reader from Image to Image Assist, Image Attach, and finally the TinyMCE DrupalImage button, the last of which had escaped me in my previous forays into online documentation and support forum discussions. I was only disappointed not to find an answer to another longstanding want: easy bulk image upload for end-users.
Winborn does not always take a single path through the forest. Often, he points out two or three different paths that might work well for your needs, while omitting mention of those that (I assume) he feels might not. After the comprehensive introduction to Image, Winborn changes approach. He describes how to use ImageField and ImageCache in conjunction with one's own custom content type. Comparing the two approaches not only helped me better understand how to structure my own approach but also provided an important insight into the Drupal ecosystem.
Winborn takes care not to blow his own horn too loudly. His creation, Embedded Media Field, plays third string behind other image solutions. The explanation is critical to integration with third-party media hosts such as Flickr and YouTube.
Winborn introduces the book as a "beginner to intermediate" Drupal resource while acknowleding the advanced nature of some examples. I thought this description was right on. A Drupal beginner would likely not be comfortable implementing some of the solutions provided, for example adding a preprocess hook to display the appropriate media player for an attached video. On the other hand, I found the emphasis on Node Reference essential for me to understand how to keep media items in their own nodes yet allow web pages to display them in the proper player.
Later in the book, Winborn takes a couple of thoughtful turns. He treats video before audio, upsetting the conventional order between them yet explicitly acknowledging the dominance of video these days. He also presents the embedded video field before addressing how to upload "local" video files. That also makes good sense to me, as I have quickly discovered how even a low-volume site benefits from hosting video at a specialized provider, such as Blip.tv.
Your perspective on the book may depend on your definition of "beginner" and "intermediate." I benefitted from both the high-level view and the relatively complex explanations. The book provided something to seek me teeth into and room for growth, which I imagine every Drupal developer needs. True beginners may quickly lose themselves in the details. Advanced users may not find the text sufficiently challenging.
Drupal Multimedia will remain an essential resource for me, due to its vertical treatment of key techniques. Yet, I also find myself wanting more almost immediately. Will DrupalImage reach production site quality for Drupal 6? How should I provide bulk image upload capability to end users? What will support and maintenance of these techniques look like a year from now? While I am glad to have added this book to my knowledge base, I have quickly followed up the read with more tinkering on a test site and surfing the discussion forums.
Richard Kassissieh is Director of Information Technology at Catlin Gabel School.
He writes on Drupal and other topics at http://kassblog.com
 waist November 22, 2008
J. Wang (New York)
0 out of 9 found this review helpful
the book talks about something that a person will know the second s/he puts on those module
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