On the last day of the media sprint, Darrel and I are camped out in the Open Flows office here in the lovely Lower East Side. NYC has a fresh coating of ice and we are hard at work trying to tie up some of the loose ends- well there will be lots of loose ends, but we are trying to put some closure on a major step toward a unified resource (file) GUI and a new back end for Drupal's resource (file) handling.

Darrel, Aaron, and Steve's work on the php stream wrapper layer is a foundational element for transitioning Drupal away from thing about files/media/resources as items which exists on the local file system. Shortly, embeded content from YouTube, Blip, etc, will be able to be handled the same way a file uploaded to the file system can. Further, FTP, S3, etc services can all provide resources for Drupal to handle.

The media module will provide a front end for adding resource content to pages- modules which integrate with it can expose file lists, uploaders, and formatting options to the user.

All and all, we've made some significant progress. Of course, from this vantage, we now see much more clearly what work lies ahead, but I think we're at a point where other people maybe inspired to help out- the vision is quite a bit clearer and many of the elements are in place to help push things along.

For further reading

• stream module
• media module
• GUI discussion
• Screencasts of our work
• media module documentation