Media Module for Drupal 7 now in Beta

One of the modules that a lot of users are waiting for to be ready for Drupal 7 is the Media module. It was from the beginning going to be available for both Drupal 6 and 7, but today the development is focused on the Drupal 7 version.

A few weeks ago I downloaded and tested it in my local dev environment and have to say I was quite impressed. It was easy to set up and the integration with the WYSIWYG editor (CKEditor) worked really well. The cool thing with that integration is that you will have access to already uploaded media objects, or upload new ones with it, without having to attache them to the node itself. I also tested adding fields to the media objects and in Drupal 7 that is as easy as adding fields to any other entity that supports it.

Centralised Media Management in Drupal

The main goal with the Media module is to provide a centralised media management framework, building on the advancements that has been made to file support in Drupal 7. Some of the work with the module have actually ended up being part of Core, such as the stream wrappers as I wrote more about in an earlier post. In that post you can also watch a video with a demonstration of the module.

The Media module itself is not intended to be a complete solution for media management, instead it will provide the features that most sites will need. More special features, including support for third party website integration, content delivery networks (CDN) and so on will be in separate modules. This is the right way of doing it, instead of one big monster module having everything, you get a lean module that easily can be extended with only the things you need for your sites. That is also the Drupal way of extending core functionality and one of the main reasons for its success.

Beta Released

Until recently it has been quite difficult for anyone outside the developers to actually test the module. This has partly been due to that it has been developed against Drupal 7 HEAD. Until the first beta version of Drupal 7 was release, API's and many other thing changed all the time, and the developers had to play a cat and mouse game to keep up with the changes. Now though things are different and the first Media module beta version has been released for you to test it.

Important: Please not that the Media module beta 1 only works with Drupal 7 beta 1, not with the recently released beta 2. For more information about this, see this issue ticket for the module. The developer are aware of the problem and are working on fixing it.

You can download the media module from its project page on drupal.org.