We had a core conversation about media at DrupalCon Prague. It's conclusion was that we should organize a sprint where we would discuss media handling in Drupal 8. Sprint actually took place on Friday, the official sprint day at DrupalCon. It was completely non-coding sprint as we could better describe it as a meeting. Our goal was to define general roadmap for media in next major release of Drupal. Quite a lot of people showed their interest, which once again confirmed importance of this field.

At the end of the day we agreed on several conclusions:

Media handling deserves much more attention. There is quite a lot of interest, but it looks like we didn't manage to create enough momentum. Media ecosystem should consist out of decoupled components that can be used depending on the specific use-case. There are so many different situations that there is no way to satisfy all of them with one sole solution. Simple personal blogs need something completely different than complex media websites, but we should still try to cover both. Our idea is to create few independent pieces, that will form basic API. We're going to build other parts (UIs, configuration, listings, integrations, ...) on top of that. Out of the box media solutions will group those pieces together to create final experience. This will potentially allow to create different final solutions for different types of websites, while still relying on the same lower level code. We are aiming to something similar to what Drupal Commerce is doing. Basic parts of the ecosystem should be available relatively soon in the Drupal 8 stable lifecycle. This is absolutely needed to achieve proper adoption. We cannot say when exactly is that as it depends on the momentum we're going to build around that. If you think our ideas are good and you you're going to need media solution for Drupal 8 do not hesitate to join us. Media ecosystem will be built around so called "media entity". Media entity is slightly different to File entity, as local files represent only one of it's subsets. Media can, in theory, relate to just any form of media (local files, remotely hosted videos, galleries, tweets, ...). Even other articles could be used as media (this is not very common use case, but we should not assume that nobody will need something as funky as this).

We will rely on standard Drupal tools as much as possible. This includes Views, Entity reference field, Field API itself, Entity API, Plugins, ... We're aiming to combine the best concepts from D7 solutions such as Media, Scald, MediaBox, Asset, etc. The group agreed to follow the "first Friday" initiative and have future meetings during the first Friday of each month. Do not hesitate to join us!

You wondering how to join and help? Check Media entity issue queues, engage in discussions on g.d.o/media, join us on #drupal-media and attend our "first Friday" meetings (to be announced on g.d.o/media). Not a coder? No problem! We need people of various expertise (frontend design and development, UX, testing, PR, ...). Even if you "just" have a great idea do not hesitate to share it! You can also help by just spreading the word; tell about the initiative to your collegues and friends or give a session at your Drupal meetup or camp.

We can already confirm that we're organizing an extended sprint at DrupalCamp Vienna.

Let's collaborate to make Drupal 8 the best media manipulation platform!