Media in Drupal 8:

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW

https://slides.com/phenaproxima/d8media

phenaproxima

• Senior Software Engineer @ Acquia
• Media Initiative coordinator 
• Media system co-maintainer
• Lightning distro maintainer
• The loud guy in the contribution room

OVERVIEW

• Purpose and architecture
• Media vs. file/image fields
• Live demo! 😱
• Useful modules
• What's next?
• Q+A

THE MEDIA SYSTEM

Two purposes. Two modules.

1. Media: Represent media as Drupal entities
2. Media Library: Make media reusable in the UI

MEDIA ITEMS ARE ENTITIES

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

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

MEDIA TYPES...

• Media can be a LOT more than images
• Media are reusable and fieldable
• Brings power, flexibility, and consistency

WHY THIS IS GOOD

FILE/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
  • have a special field to store Important Stuff
  • sources can be more than just images
• File and image fields: content owns image
• Media fields: media owns image; content references media
• Media Library only works with media

LIVE DEMO!

A FEW USEFUL MODULES

(and one useless one)

👍 USEFUL MODULE:

ENTITY BROWSER

• Generic and open-ended
• Needs a lot of set-up
• Harder to make usable and accessible
• Peacefully coexists with core tools
• More complicated; good for unusual use cases

Media Library is NOT a replacement for Entity Browser!

• Generic and open-ended
• Needs a lot of set-up
• Peacefully coexists with core tools
• More complicated; better for unusual use cases

👍 USEFUL MODULE:

ENTITY EMBED

• Obsolete; moved into core
• Big ecosystem...most of which now uses core tools
• Version 2 is an update path to core Media

👎 USELESS MODULE:

MEDIA ENTITY

WHAT'S NEXT?

• Fix all the bugs
• Migration path for existing files and images
• Replace File & Image modules?
• Adding Media and Media Library core OOTB

Questions??

THANK YOU!!!

@phenaproxima

drupal.org/u/phenaproxima

slides.com/phenaproxima/d8media