Ok so I totally missed my deadline of January 1 for Media Mover 2. Fine.

The alpha is actually nearing- this time I mean it. The selecting files from views works, auto generating images for imagecache (multiples all at once), full Drush support, unlimited actions per step, FTP module has been completely rewritten and does a better job of auto linking FTP content (by users, by directory, by token) then it did previously, the number of modules has been reduced to make configuration building easier, configurations in code, the API is new and simplified (and easy to upgrade to!) and so on. Hey, the interface even got an overhaul which makes it feel more like Views, and so on. Yes there are probably lots of bugs still. There is no upgrade path from Media Mover 1 and won't be until the bugs are not serious.

So here is some of the pudding. This is the new admin landing page which lists all of the configurations. Here you see three different types of configurations- disabled, overriden from code, and normal- built from the admin interface. What is no longer here is the notion of child configurations- with configurations now having unlimited steps it seems unnecessary to add the complexity of having the child configurations. Selecting files from an existing configuration is still possible so I'm going to argue that Media Mover 2 offers more possibilities for building configurations despite lacking this feature.

The configuration landing page has changed somewhat as well. You have a reasonable snapshot of what steps are in the configuration, which are are running, how many files are in which states, and some of the basic workflow options.

When you go to create a new configuration, you've got lots of options to choose from. Not all the file selectors are quite stable, but you can see that things are moving right along. Once you add your mechanism to select files...

... you get a big old list of what you can do next. You can add as many additional options as you like- you can even run the same action twice- say for example you want to FTP backup to two different places you can add both actions to the same configuration. In Media Mover 1 configurations were limited to 4 steps - harvesting (now called selecting), processing, storing, and the poorly named complete. Now Media Mover does not care about what wacky things you need to do with your files. It is even possible to add new steps after your configuration has been built- so if you forgot that you need to save a sixth copy over to the NAS on the sixth floor just go ahead and tack it on.

Once you have created the configuration, it is simple to run it from the administration interface. Running a configuration gives you some handy information about what happened. When set to run automatically, Media Mover 6.2.x uses Drupal Queue to queue all of its work. If you know how to manipulate the queue workers, you can do some fancy things with multiple servers or timing of specific kinds of tasks.

If you are thrilled with Drush you can do some neat stuff on the command line with Media Mover now. This makes it easy for remote servers and other scripts to get their hands dirty with all things Media Mover.

Categories: Drupalmedia moverPlanet Drupal2.0 schmoo point oh