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Upgrading the Drupal Brightcove module

Developer
Oct 10, 2013

Brightcove is one of the leading video platforms and video management companies that provides professional quality video delivery for all kinds of audiences with different devices. The restructuring of the Media module resulted in two separate versions, so we had to follow up with the development of the Brightcove integration module to support the new one as well. From its launch, the Media module has had the ambitious goal to solve Drupal's long standing media handling problem. To this end the Media module has:

  • A unified mechanism that can be used to integrate different types of media, be it images or embedded videos, into text areas through a WYSIWYG editor
  • A unified interface for adding any type of media as a field to entities
  • Flexible display filters for image manipulation, audio & video players and more
  • A library for all media types that have been enabled on a site

For these reasons, when the Brightcove module got ported to Drupal 7, it was a no-brainer to integrate it with the Media module. However as most young projects, also the Media module has been subject to some serious refactoring after its initial release. But since both versions had different APIs, this created a complex situation where site builders and maintainers needed to choose between version 1 or 2 of the Media module depending on the Media module plugins they want to use and whether or not those modules have already been upgraded.

  • Media module version 1 is the recommended and stable release.
  • Media module version 2 will have the new features, but it has only had an alpha2 version up until now.

To ensure maximum usability of the Brightcove module, this meant we had to support both versions of the module. We've done this by creating 2 releases of the BC module, each of them paired with a different version of the Media module.

  • BC version 3 supports Media version 1.
  • BC version 4 supports Media version 2.

The Brightcove integration module is an out-of-the-box solution to integrate your Drupal site with the Brightcove API. It supports a wide range of features and can be configured to address different use cases. On top of the Media module upgrade work, we also added a few new features in the most recent releases: we’ve extended the BC module with playlist handling, so everything users can do with videos, they can now also do with playlists and the BC module now also supports field collections. The module is actively maintained and under active development. We’ve fixed the major bugs that were reported in the issue queue. One of these bugs was related to the Entity API module. The entity_access() function doesn’t correctly handle the “create” operation: it broke the browser and autocomplete functionality on Brightcove fields. The main issue hasn’t been fixed yet in the Entity API module, but we’ve deployed a workaround to make the module functions properly. We are discussing the implementation of a series of new features like “features exportables” with the team at Brightcove, who have been supporting our work. So stay tuned for more Brightcove goodness!

Daniel graduated as an Economic Software Engineer at the University of Szeged, Hungary. He met Drupal in 2009 and became a huge fan of the CMS and the community. He has skills and work experience in PHP, MySQL, HTML, JQuery, CSS, and also in version control systems like SVN and Git. He started working with Drupal as an intern at a creative agency and became a Drupal developer by being involved in several big projects. As a Drupal developer at Pronovix, he takes part in internal and external Drupal developments.

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