A year after answering Dries Buytaert's call for Drupal book authors, Aaron Winborn is pleased to announce the publication of Drupal Multimedia, which is now available! Packt Publishing, known for their support of Open Source projects, will donate a portion of the book's royalties to the Drupal Association.

The book teaches the best practices and contributed modules for integrating Images, Video, and Audio into your site. Written for Drupal 6, the book assumes you are a developer, themer, or administrator who needs to embed multimedia. It makes heavy use of Content Construction Kit (CCK) and Views 2, and offers demonstrations of the various modules required for the task.

The book helps to answer common questions, such as when to use Image or ImageField, how to leverage the power of FileField, and how to override theme functions to display multimedia content the way we need it.

Drupal Multimedia is roughly split into three sections, for Images, Video, and Audio. Each section recommends the modules to use for specific tasks, and offers best practices for developing your site.

Images

• Image or Image Field?
• Inline images, galleries, teaser thumbnails
• Scaling & cropping on the fly
• Styling Views, drop-shadows, and more

Video

• Local or external video?
• Media Mover
• Embedded Media Field
• File Field, jQuery Media, and more

Audio

• What player to use?
• Embedding audio clips
• Playlist creation
• Creating embed code & more

More!

• File Asset Management
• Dynamic Image Headers
• jCarousel Slide Shows
• The future of Drupal's multimedia handling
• and More!

The book's technical editors include James Walker (walkah), Kristof De Jaeger (swentel), Bruno De Bondt (brunodbo), and Ryan Shrout (Vigile).

Aaron Winborn has been a developer for Advomatic for nearly three years, where he has helped to develop and maintain sites such as Air America, The New York Observer, Mozilla, It's Your Nature, and the NRDC.

He is also a developer and maintainer of several multimedia-oriented modules, including (among others) the Embedded Media Field, Views Slideshow, jQuery Media, Drupal's own Media Player, and Media Transcriptions. He is actively involved in many related issue queues, both among other contributed modules and in Drupal core.

Aaron will be presenting how he's cloned YouTube for a session at Do It With Drupal in New Orleans, from December 10-12. He'll also present an overview of the current state of Drupal Multimedia for DrupalCamp Philly on November 19, similar to other panels he participated in, such as DrupalCampNYC 5, DrupalCon Boston 2008, and remotely at DrupalCamp Colorado.

He's also preparing for a session/panel about Drupal Multimedia for DrupalCon DC from March 7-9, 2009.

Aaron lives in Harrisburg, PA, with his partner Gwen, their daughter Ashlin, and their dog Mia, overseen by their cat Theo. In addition to his pursuing his passion for Drupal, he currently serves as secretary for The Circle School, a Sudbury model school (which is a democratic, non-compulsory, aged-mixed educational model). He has been involved in web development and Sudbury schools for over ten years.

Drupal version: Drupal 6.x