Media in Drupal 8+

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

https://slides.com/phenaproxima/d8media

phenaproxima

• Engineer @ Acquia
   
• Media coordinator and co-maintainer
   
• Likes dogs
   
• Talks too fast

OVERVIEW

• Architectural wade-in
• Media fields vs. image fields
• Live demo! 😱
• A few useful modules
• What's next for Media

THE MEDIA SYSTEM

Two modules:

1. Media represents media as Drupal entities
2. Media Library makes media reusable in the UI

MEDIA ARE ENTITIES

• They have all the superpowers.
  • fieldable
  • revisionable
  • translatable
  • themeable
  • ...etc.​
• Media items have types

• similar to content types
   
• have a source (kind of media)
   
• have a "source field" to store the most important data

MEDIA TYPES...

• Media is more than files and images
   
• Consistent across types
   
• All the benefits of entities
   
• Reusable!

WHY THIS IS GOOD

IMAGE FIELD

node

image field

node

image field

media

MEDIA FIELD

MEDIA LIBRARY

• Finally.
• Author-facing UI for selecting and adding media
• Simple, usable, accessible
• Nearly zero configuration
• Customizable via Views
• Integrates with CKEditor
• Can be integrated with other things too

LET US RECAP

• Media:
  • are entities
  • have a type
  • keep crucial data in a field
  • sources can be more than just images
• With image fields, content owns image. With media fields, media owns image and is referenced by content
• Media Library is 😍 but only works with media

LIVE DEMO!

A FEW USEFUL MODULES

(and an almost-useless one)

👍 USEFUL MODULE:

ENTITY BROWSER

• Generic and powerful
   
• Takes work to set up
   
• Works alongside Media Library
   
• Best for unusual use cases
   
• 👉 Media Library is not a replacement!

• Generic and powerful
   
• Takes work to set up
   
• Works alongside core tools
   
• Best for unusual use cases

👍 USEFUL MODULE:

ENTITY EMBED

• Helps track where entities are used
   
• Tracks various usage methods
   
• Useful for managing reusable media
   
• Extensible via custom code

👍 USEFUL MODULE:

ENTITY USAGE

• Media Entity Twitter
   
• Media Entity Instagram
   
• Media Entity Audio
   
• Media Entity SoundCloud
   
• ...and more!

drupal.org/project/media_entity

👍 USEFUL MODULES:

MEDIA ENTITY X

• Obsolete!
   
• Became the core Media module
   
• Most of its ecosystem now uses core tools
   
• 8.x-2.0 is a migration to core

🙏 Please don't use this module.

👎 (ALMOST) USELESS MODULE:

MEDIA ENTITY

WHAT'S NEXT?

• Fix allll the bugs (especially UX and a11y)
   
• Get more sites on Media instead of File/Image
   
• Media out of the box with Drupal

GO FORTH AND BUILD GREAT THINGS!

@phenaproxima

slides: tinyurl.com/ybtmfgs7