Drupal's integration with new Youtube API to have a video portal profile

[ Abstract ]

A quick search of open source frameworks for video portals give results like Phpmotion and Vshare, which are not free or not completely free. Other problem with these applications is that the portal owner/administrator will have to manage media and cost that comes with it.Youtube's initiative in form its new API enables the complete CRUD workflow and video's are managed by efficient google clusters.This brings the opportunity to build a functionality of "out of the box" video portal as suggesed by kbahey .With help of a new module and plugging in with existing functionalities of drupal like cck, feed api we can create polymorphic drupal which can primarily act as video portal.Current contrib modules on drupal.org like emfield, media_mover does a good job but then again are meant and were designed for different purposes.I think we also need a GDATA protocol skeleton in drupal in form of api to talk to google services in a more flexible manner.This project though will use feed api and set namespaces for Youtube over GDATA specifically, The idea is to build a module or couple of modules which can then be rolled out as a installation profile for a video portal.

[Drupal.org Username ]

Dipen Chaudhary
My user node : http://drupal.org/user/100291

[Link to Proposal Discussion ]

http://groups.drupal.org/node/9829

[Benefits to Drupal/open source community]

This will add a installation profile which enables drupal as a video portal and benefits open source by giving functionality like Phpmotion/Vshare even better (as video's are managed by google) and is truly free and open, As youtube decided to give away chromeless player, it will lure developers to make video portals of specific domains like guitar tutorials etc and as youtube API has CRUD now,this will also benefit youtube if domain specific user's prefer to upload their videos on these and the same spirits will be seen in community related sections of youtube like commenting etc. I really think domain specific portals will come up if we can provide a painless framework in conjunction with drupal for developers to create such portals.

[ Project Details ]
I'll be using feed API or if time permits, I would wanna make that skeleton of GDATA protocol for drupal which was a project idea in Gsoc
2006 http://drupal.org/node/60490 and has come up again this year http://groups.drupal.org/node/10142 .. This module ideally should also plug with aggregator module to retrieve new videos based on categories, user and other axises.. GDATA protocol primarily talks XML
and drupal has a pretty stable feed parsing API's and methods, so this project is very much feasible. System will come with a predefined cck
type like image module. I have studied the new Youtube API briefly before assessing effort required and I think we can implement all of
CRUD, community based interactions like commenting, rating and video responses once authentication system is working and interacting
correctly with YouTube. Reading from YouTube doesn't require authentication hence each tag can be parsed and put in a cck
node type with rating,comments and other fields with it for which most of the work is done in emfield, whereas any of CUD or user specific
tasks will require authentication which can be plugged to Youtube's authentication system which is based on tokens as all GDATA based
services.Once a user uploads or updates a video on YouTube appropriate node in drupal gets updated.I think we can also exploit Youtube
Javascript API to define cool events like if a user navigates from page video is paused. Javascript API really gives fine control over
the player.We can extend emfield to have a predefined cck type with all fields now and use that for reading (R of CRUD) and have a
separate module for CUD or move the whole functionality to a new module.My findings shows that this project is very much feasible and
can be completed in given time line.

[DELIVERABLES]

1> For the design uploading workflow is already given in YouTube dev
docs for Read and Write I will create appropriate schemes and designs.

2> Extend emfield for Reading and a new module for all other
authentication based tasks,or a totally separate module as my mentor
would suggest.

3> Customizing installation as a profile and basic plugging with
aggregator module

[ Project Schedule ]

April 14 - May 25 : reading up all necessary documentation, trying
code sample, cvs set up, Design of the project with help of my mentor

May 25 - June 10 : Either extend emfield or do Reading part of the API

June 11 - June 15 : Authentication System

June 16 - June 25 : Things like user feeds, standard feeds like "top
rated", "most watched" etc.

June 26 - July 6 : Uploading, Updating and Deleting

July 7 - July 13 : Community related functionality

July 16 - July 25 : Javascript and Player building

July 26 - august 2 : Aggregator module pluggability

August 2 - August 11 : Coding style and optimization with help of my mentor

[About me ]
I found drupal one and half years ago when I was building a communication portal for my LUG (www.vit.ac.in/lug), I was in the 3rd
year of my college then, after which I did some freelancing using drupal, but pretty basic stuff. I got a big leap when I got a chance
to work on my final semester project with Dr. Sunit Gala, CTO of careseek Inc. (www.careseek.com) in December of 2007. I am still a
trainee here and working on "ontologies of folksonomy using drupal's controlled taxanomy" which will have benefits in tag cleaning based on
classifier built using theory of evidence.I will finish with my project by May 8 2008 and during this process I will have worked on at
least two social networks viz careseek.com, soon to go live on Drupal ( April 14 is expected date), and Ilovebolly.com (First week of May).
In these projects I really got to enhance my drupal skills and extended few modules which will soon patch into the community (After
going live). Few things I worked on were extending fivestar module to have rating on multiple axis, Correcting Node Import to take multiple
node references, Primitive Multi level marketing structure, Correcting cck_field_privacy for some basic error's. My curriculum project on
semantic web made me look into YouTube API to collect metadata for tag cleaning. I will soon start blogging about my drupal experience of last 5 months on www.playdrupal.com, I have at least 40 drafts buried in there which I wish to finish some day.. I rarely update my blog which
is located at http://blog.dipenchaudhary.com because of lack of time. I was once in the documentation team of Dojo Toolkit and helped in
writing book 1.0. You can also find me in contributor's list, but currently fascinated with jquery as its the endorsed JS library for
drupal and fun to code in. My other field of interest are high performance computing which I undertook as my research area for 2
years and have some interesting projects on Clusters and Grid Computing