Tony Barker talks Drupal CMS media management on the Talking Drupal podcast

Tony Barker was relatively busy as a frontend specialist on Annertech’s Managed Services team. Then work began on Drupal CMS (formerly known as the Starshot Initiative) and Tony was selected to head up the track that handles the new product’s media management. 

Since then, he’s had his head down, organising how the new Drupal product will manage items such as images, videos and files. 

From researching international best practices to making decisions about which features should and could be included in Drupal CMS, and then working on getting the development finished in time for launch, Tony has finally come up for air. 

He took some time to chat to the team of the popular podcast Talking Drupal about how things are going, and what we can expect from the media track for the first iteration of Drupal CMS, which is due to be released in January 2025.

Media management in Drupal CMS refers to a broader definition of media than that in Drupal Core. Tony’s first job was to narrow this down and decide what types of media to focus on and include in the first release. This entailed a lot of research, which he plans to document with a mince pie in hand in December.  

He also needed to decide what would be in scope; what would be possible to achieve by the January release deadline. 

“We couldn’t just look at editing without it affecting how we render things, so I decided to look at everything, from uploading or putting a URL in the editor to how it renders on the frontend,” he told Talking Drupal hosts Nic Laflin, John Picozzi and guest host Suzanne Dergacheva. 

“Media management plays an important part in our users’ goals and what they’re trying to achieve. It’s important because it’s going to affect the look and feel of their websites, and also things like performance and SEO optimisation,” he said. 

“We don’t want marketers or editors to have to worry about things like responsive images or image styles. Drupal is an ecosystem so it presents some interesting challenges if we want to solve all of the problems and create the ultimate incredible system. We can improve the user experience without too much pain, and we’ve made small incremental changes. But there are larger challenges down the line where we have to think about architecture in systems.” said Tony. 

The team has come far in a very short space of time. 

“It takes an extraordinary amount of work to make something appear simple,” Tony told Nic. 

“Every time you think of making a change you realise that there’s a really good reason why Drupal does it the way it’s been done in Drupal.” 

But for now, the first phase of the Media recipe has been merged into Drupal CMS, ready for the January release, and Tony’s long-term vision for media management has been submitted. 

We can’t wait to take it for a test drive.