Is the media project dead?

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emptyvoid's picture

Hello,
I've provided a few patches for the various modules that drive the media module and extend it. Yet most of the patches appear to be ignored and the modules as a whole don't appear to have any recent releases.

Is it fair to assume that this initiative has seriously stalled or is just plain dead?

Comments

Aside from ignoring the

Dave Reid's picture

Aside from ignoring the obvious facts, no, it's quite active and has contributors making progress every week. Can you point to specific patches you've been working on?

Senior Drupal Developer for Lullabot | www.davereid.net | @davereid

I also have a big problem

Dave Reid's picture

I also have a big problem with an attitude of 'I've made patches, why hasn't anyone looked at them??' that seems to be popping up more often in the Drupal community. There is no guarantee that someone will personally review your patch within X amount of hours. This is Open Source. Yes, we are trying to drive the primary projects of Media (Media and File entity themselves) forward but sometimes things don't pique our interest at the time. You can always help yourself by encouraging others, coworkers, etc to review your patches so that they are in a RTBC state by the time a maintainer can get to them, which likely would be faster than waiting for a maintainer to come by and review your patch among the many others waiting without any kind of review.

Senior Drupal Developer for Lullabot | www.davereid.net | @davereid

13 commits last month alone,

fuzzy76's picture

13 commits last month alone, 5 months since last release. That's a pretty active development if you ask me.

None of the 4 most used Drupal modules (Views, Token, CTools and Pathauto) has any newer releases (if you ignore a couple of days difference). Wouldn't call them dead either. Pathauto's latest release is an entire year old.

@fuzzy76: I completely

slashrsm's picture

@fuzzy76: I completely disagree with Media being dead, but I think you're not right. All modules that you listed have recommended and stable releases, while Media/File entity have not. There is Media 7.x-1.x, but lacks so many important features that probably does not even count.

I think that we should not blame the messenger here...

Janez Urevc - software engineer @ Examiner.com - @slashrsm - janezurevc.name

Strong words that the 7.x-1.x

Dave Reid's picture

Strong words that the 7.x-1.x branch doesn't count, but I completely disagree because that also insults the work everyone put into that release. Personally, I find that a little insulting.

Senior Drupal Developer for Lullabot | www.davereid.net | @davereid

I am sorry if it sounded like

slashrsm's picture

I am sorry if it sounded like this. That was definitely not my intent. What I wanted to say is that we should have stable release of 7.x-2.x. 7.x-1.x has very limited feature set and people have been asking for more. It's feature set cannot compete with other media-related modules out there.

There are also my contributions in both 7.x-1.x and 7.x-2.x, so I would also insult myself.

Janez Urevc - software engineer @ Examiner.com - @slashrsm - janezurevc.name

At the risk of becoming a new

kreynen's picture

At the risk of becoming a new target for @Dave Reid's Twitter rage, I'm going to try to reframe this thread.

The use of the unstable tag and not rolling a new 7.x-2.x release since November 2012 has discouraged use and the usage numbers (https://drupal.org/project/usage/media) reflect that...

344 - 7.x-2.x-dev
9,392 - 7.x-2.0-unstable7
4,150 - Other 7.x-1.x releases
50,292 - 7.x-1.3
30,637 - 7.x-1.2
19,795 - Other 7.x-1.x releases

So ~100,724 or 87% of the sites using Media are using a version that "lacks so many important features and probably shouldn't even count"?

The usage numbers don't take into account installs using a version cloned from git or patches applied to the release, but the numbers clearly indicate that very few people are using anything beyond the last tagged release. I think this makes growing the number of people contributing directly or indirectly to patches more difficult.

This release tag stagnation isn't unique to Media. It exists in several popular modules including Feeds. In D7, Feeds has never made it past an alpha release. The lack of any kind of roadmap for contributors for what needs to be resolved for a beta or rc release and no communication for weeks from the module's maintainers makes it difficult to get new features like support for file entities committed...

https://drupal.org/node/1033202#comment-7710367

While I'd love to see direct import and field mapping of Media entities from MediaRSS sources, I'm not sure that's going to possible in D7 the way Feeds and Media are being maintained. The entity processor issue fr feeds has been active for 2 years w/ contributions from several developers, but if nothing ever gets committed the development resources eventually move on.

Can we all agree that if nothing else, there is a perception problem with Media that contributes both to fewer resources being dedicated towards issues and alternative modules being written to fill the void of a stable release of Media 2.x?

I've run @emptyvoid's original post though a constructive_criticism_filter($string). I'm hoping we can restart this thread so something productive comes from it...

Hello,
I've tried to contribute to Media with by writing a few patches for it and modules that extend it, but they never seem get to get reviewed or committed. I'd love to help, but I need some guidance. I've maintained a couple D6 modules so I'm not a newbie, but I've never maintained anything as big or popular as Media so I'm not really sure how to be effective. There hasn't been a release of the 2.x branch in 9 months. Is there a list of issues that are preventing a new 2.x release I could help with? Is there something else I could be doing so that the patches I contribute are more useful?

Thanks Keven for helping

Dave Reid's picture

Thanks Keven for helping redirect this in a more positive discussion. I think we definitely have a perception problem for those on the outside of the initiative that things are unstable, not yet released, and unmaintained. While those of us on the inside know we are very close to getting to an alpha release, and have been working hard in our spare time towards a goal which is very hard to do, which is make something that makes the majority of users happy and want to use the module, while making possible all the crazy use cases people think up, but not directly adding those types of features.

We definitely don't have as much momentum as we used to. It's a combination of disinterest, leadership, and all the typical open source "issues", in addition to, if I may repeat myself, this being a not easy niche to solve.

Where we could go from here is tag a final unstable release before our Media sprint this Sunday in Iowa City, where we are slated to have at least 20 participants helping with the remaining alpha issue blockers, which is currently down to 5 remaining issues: https://drupal.org/project/issues/search?projects=File+entity+%28fieldab...

Senior Drupal Developer for Lullabot | www.davereid.net | @davereid

Perception problem.

majortom's picture

"I think we definitely have a perception problem for those on the outside of the initiative that things are unstable, not yet released, and unmaintained."

As someone who has been waiting on a 2.0 release (with the hope that it will figure out how to handle private file systems - I cannot code, but I would be happy to contribute cash if that would help :-) ), I think you have hit the nail on the head. While it is true that there was a new 1.x release in March, it has been almost 9 months since there was a new release in the 2.x branch.

I check the Alpha blockers every few weeks and although there has been movement, it is hard for outsiders to see. Unfortunately, without releases and or project news, it would be easy for an outsider to assume that the 2.x branch had died.

"This release tag stagnation isn't unique to Media. It exists in several popular modules including Feeds. In D7, Feeds has never made it past an alpha release. The lack of any kind of roadmap for contributors for what needs to be resolved for a beta or rc release and no communication for weeks from the module's maintainers makes it difficult to get new features like support for file entities committed..."

This is, to me, one of Drupal's biggest issues. Many of the modules I used for my D6 site, never got updated to D7. I am concerned that this will also be a problem for D8.

I appreciate all the work those of you who can code do. I help run the site for a small non-profit, and whenever I can, I donate funds to help projects we use or would like to use (sometimes organizational funds, sometimes personal funds). Unfortunately, with many projects (media included), there is no clear way for those of us who cannot write code to contribute (or even understand what is happening).

I look forward to a future release, and again thank all who have and will make it happen.

Momentum

eigentor's picture

I have been a big proponent of Media from its first release and am using the 7.2.x branch. Recently I upgraded a site from 7.1.x to 7.2.x and apart from the thumbnails view in the files overview, everything works.
So 7.2.x is very much usable and it probably reflects more the high standards of the maintainers than the actual state of the code that this is not labeled alpha or beta.

Still, for a project so long running and starting out with so much promise, there clearly seems to be a momentum problem. Drupal 8 initiatives sucking up a lot of dev power surely does not help either.

To get to a stable release and implement some long-standing feature requests (that already have been approved by the team), I guess nothing can help than some sponsorship/planning/sprinting attack that is kept up for at least some months.

Somebody has got to lead this, which everybody knows is a hell of a lot of work and cat get negative backleash if it does not work out as quickly as intended. I don't know if Dave has plans or capacities to take that role, but somehow he has his name sticking on the project...

We've seen it with other big projects / core initiatives in Drupal: unless you get one or two of the bigger companies and some serious money behind it it is hard to get a project ahead that is not an easy one to solve while still being in such desperate demand.

Life is a journey, not a destination

Quick update

Dave Reid's picture

Both modules now have recent, not-unstable releases, alpha1 of both File Entity and Media, accomplished by the about 15 hard-working individuals at the 2013 DrupalCorn camp sprint day today. We have even added more maintainers to the individual integration modules to help keep them up to date faster.

Senior Drupal Developer for Lullabot | www.davereid.net | @davereid

Congratulations!

majortom's picture

I look forward to testing this version. Thanks again for all your hard work.

Karma++ Great job guys!

slashrsm's picture

Karma++ Great job guys!

Janez Urevc - software engineer @ Examiner.com - @slashrsm - janezurevc.name

Change log

eigentor's picture

That is an impressive amount of commits for that first alpha
https://drupal.org/node/2062803

Life is a journey, not a destination

Sorry for the asshat post

emptyvoid's picture

Woah!
I totally forgot about this post. Reading it yes, I agree my post was very snarky boarding on "assish".

Please accept my apologies for the poorly expressed post. It's been a while since I checked up on modules in the community and I'm in the process of refreshing my distro for development work.

I noticed that all of the following modules added together seriously improve the usability and stability of the media module.

File Entity
https://drupal.org/project/file_entity

Media (of course)
https://drupal.org/project/media

Media Browser Plus
(the new 3.0 branch is great)
https://drupal.org/project/media_browser_plus

When I have time I'd love to identify and contribute more patches for the aforementioned modules. And maybe I can conduct an audit on this FAQ page.

https://groups.drupal.org/node/168009

Everyone else has already expressed or elaborated on the topics and responses I'd give so I'll just shut my trap and contribute where I can.

Robert Foley Jr
Solutions Architect
http://www.robertfoleyjr.com

Useability from a non-pro user's POV

SteveMushynsky's picture

Media module useability is a killing roadblock in site development for me. For one instance, the media browser appears at upper left corner of page, out of initial view, and is much too small to contain its content using 7.2 alpha or 7.x dev versions. Once tried, Media seems not to be able to be completely removed. Net result is a module that is unusable, unreversable and has destroyed display of images that were already on the site. Stalemate. Frustration. I have observed and do appreciate the hard work done by the many cognoscenti that have worked to conquer the acknowledged deficiencies ("WYSIWYG integration is broken", et al) and note that problems show as "fixed" with application of developed patches. At risk of engendering an irritated response, please understand that 'fixes' via required application of multiple patches is not a practical solution for non-pro users and it is unrealistic to expect tens of thousands of users to be happy with a usable-only-with-multiple-patches status. I would very much like to be able to use Media and its promised features and have experience with use of many modules on some quite complicated sites, but Media is uniquely inoperative for me as opposed to hundreds of modules I've installed on other sites and has done damage to this site on which I have invested many hours. I note that other postings expressing frustration have apparently resulted in some "snarky" responses. Before responding to this with irritation, please stop a moment and consider how this situation appears to tens of thousands of non-pro, yet otherwise competent site developers. Biting the messenger does little to help this situation and I suspect I am a more typical user than you might think.

When you make statements like

arthurf's picture

When you make statements like "[media module] has done damage to this site" and "Media is uniquely inoperative for me" without providing bug reports or specific information about your context you're going to get the ire of people who've been involved in this project. While you do mention 2 issues at the beginning of your post, neither is damaging to a site and simply not the experience of myself and others who are using 2.x-dev branch on production sites. More than likely the first is a CSS issue with your theme, the second maybe something you need to adjust to meet needs. Post an issue or link to an existing one.

Framing your response as "here are my specific issues, how can I help fix them?" is a positive kind of criticism that encourages community engagement. If you want to play the role of messenger please take the time to show that you're invested in the outcome. Not proving standard bug report information makes it unlikely that anybody can ever address your needs.

If I were you this is how I'd frame this post:

I'm using theme X. When my users use the media modal from the wysiwyg it appears in the upper left corner out of view. Is this a known issue with theme X or is this something that needs to be fixed in the dev branch? Is this an issue for the maintainer of theme X or can the CSS of media be generalized to play better with others? 

My site has a huge amount of media content. When I try to use the media browser (see attached screenshot) the modal is simply too small for what I need to display. Is there a file style that I need to adjust to get better results or some CSS that can be tweaked that would make the display more usable? 

Thank you for your

SteveMushynsky's picture

Thank you for your interpretation of issues experienced with Media as you would like them to be. The situation vis-a-vis useability by non-pro users, however, bears more resemblance to my frustration than to your chosen description. The facts remain that the Media project folks themselves recently declared Media to be inoperative with regard to WYSIWYG integration and others have reported problems with the Media browser appearance and useability. Critical issues are declared "fixed" by availability of numerous patches rather than an updated version of the module. Fixed for pro users, perhaps. Not so much for others. Yes, I could and probably should post an issue listing the theme used (Acquia Prosper. Btw, it isn't working with basic Fusion, either) and the many other modules installed (I followed the available Media documentation's recommendations), but it looks like the best I might expect is yet another patch to be applied. OK, I can (and did) revert to an earlier site backup copy to correct the damage done to my site (all images made non-viewable) and bypass Media's issues for now, but progression toward use of a promised, valuable module set should be my objective, not my frustration, no? Pardon my very obvious frustration, but consider that I've not experienced this sort of situation either in the creation of a very functional community newspaper site nor with a fairly complicated retail commercial site. Each of these used large complements of modules, none of which proved to be as problematic as Media is at present. Label me as not up to your standards if you wish. Say that Media's problem is actually the Acquia theme's problem. Declare that I've raised the developers' ire if you wish. None will fix Media or enhance its usability. I am simply confirming the Media group's own assessment that Media is in need of extensive remedial work. I wish the project group success in its efforts and I really do appreciate the magnitude of the work involved. I wish I had the time and health to develop the necessary expertise and join in that effort but regretfully, I do not.

It's "alpha" for a reason

DamienMcKenna's picture

Steve,
Pardon me for saying so, but you're forgetting something - the v2 module is labeled "alpha" for a reason - it's not ready for many people to use on their sites. If you're uncomfortable dealing with the alpha-grade v2 codebase, please use the v1 releases.

As for issues being marked as "fixed", you are misunderstanding how process works. Drupal's standard development practices dictate that an issue is marked as "fixed" when a patch is committed to the codebase; then, within twelve hours when the standard process to rebuild the dev releases is triggered again, you can download a version of the module with the fix by downloading the -dev version.

Regarding the positioning problem with the browser, this could indeed be a problem with the active theme when the popup is opened - there might be a CSS definition that includes an !important attribute causing it to be positioned incorrectly; either way, please submit an issue for it and provide some details on what theme is being used, maybe someone will be able to help track down the problem.

Media

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