During the Drupal Dojo Birds-of-a-Feather meeting at DrupalCon Boston we discussed two seperate items that I believe are interconnected: figuring out how to get more video lessons into the Dojo and doing a better job of attracting more potential teachers and students to the site. To address the first of these issues, I committed myself to doing outreach to individuals and companies who are creating video-based instructional materials to try and get them to submit their work to the Dojo. After that session I started to look around the series of tubes known as the "Internet" and I found quite a few videos. But, what I also noticed was that a good percentage of those videos already are being shared with the Drupal community, but through drupal.org/videocasts rather than the Dojo, which oddly doesn't seem to appear on the videocast pages at all. This brought to mind something that I've heard Josh and others talk about, the idea that we should consider moving the dojo to something more aligned with Drupal.org itself, and I have to say that the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me.
So, my question is this: does it make sense to consolidate our collective efforts in one location that is better connected with d.o. itself? Something like video.drupal.org, or possibly as a subsection of a <a href="http://drupal.org/handbook/customization>tutorials section of the site (which is where the videocasts now sit), which could be called something like tutorials.drupal.org.
Another project I'm involved with, the Drupal Newsletter, has just announced that it is going to become news.drupal.org, and some have suggested merging the planet in with it, so there are already similar discussions and plans going on within the d.o. community of such moves.
But what do you think? What are the potential problems that we could face if we moved the site to something more aligned with Drupal itself and the Drupal brand?
Comments
video-enable existing sites
I'd just like to be able to embed media into the existing sites (g.d.o. and drupalcon.org). Either allowing object and param tags or a module like emfield.
agreed
I'd be concerned about segregating tutorials from the Handbook in general since they're often about the same thing (say about a module, or installing or whatever). A url like docs.drupal.org/video would be pretty cool though - and this could be extended to other microsites if necessary (marketing.drupal.org/video association.drupal.org/video etc. with drupal.org/video providing a portal to each + headlines).
I agree
I agree with catch that we don't want to rip the "tutorials" (which can have different definitions for different people) out into a separate site since most of the time they are related/tied to "plain" old reference documentation.
It would be nice to one central location for a list of all Drupal videos. One of the big questions/issues we have, is getting people to upload and link them. Right now everything is pretty hodge-podge, based on if someone a) knows about the videocasts section and b) has the time/desire to create a new page to link off to the video. Then there is also the matter of next, crosslinking the video page to the right handbook pages (e.g. I made a CVS video, so I made a page in the videocasts section and then went through the CVS handbook to find the page(s) that it applied to and made links to the video page.) A lot of people don't/won't do all that work so we need to make it easier for folks to do that and/or for maintainers to see and deal with new videos.
So getting a nice searchable/sortable/tagged list of videos would be a huge boon, but we also need to figure out how to get the videos aggregated there too.
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Funny you should mention aggregating them...
because we can now use FeedAPI/FeedAPI Mapper with emfield, which is already being used by the Dojo. I have been trying to think through how this might work, and I'm working on a presentation page right for this capability, but for now you can see some of it in action here:
http://zivtech.com/feed-item/539
Basically, I'm thinking that we could pull in feeds a la the Drupal Planet, and then we (or anyone with privileges) could assign videos to their correct location, could categorize them, possibly point them to handbook pages, or structure them in whatever way worked best.
At anyrate, this seems like the only way we could get enough people to submit all of their videos, but it would still require a good amount of work to make it presentable.
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Great idea!
It makes HUGE sense to combine all tutorials in one place and move them to tutorials.drupal.org
For anyone unfamiliar with the drupal community, tutorials.drupal.org would be the obvious main place to search for drupal tutorials. Also this domain is SEO friendly and you'll be on top of the Google search for "drupal tutorial(s)" in no time.
rounding up videos
+1
I love drupal videos :) It would be great is there were a primary place to go for these, regardless of where they were hosted.
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YouTube, blip.tv
There are several options to host videos for free. Blip.TV is one, YouTube is another. There is a GSoC project for integrating the new Google YouTube API into Drupal (via one of many possible means).
That would enable having a section on d.o that has video, regardless of whether it is a tutorial, intro, presentation, ...etc.
Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
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Drupal performance tuning, development, customization and consulting: 2bits.com, Inc..
Personal blog: Baheyeldin.com.
Blip TV vs YouTube
As I mentioned in the SoC thread, I doubt that YouTube support will wait for the SoC, and according to pfournier this may happen over the weekend.
I'm not sure who the right person/people to suggest this to would be, but I would highly recommend putting most of the videos on Blip, simply because of the fact that they are actively engaging the community and they have repeatedly shown their willingness to alter their apis and feeds to make working with their site/videos a lot easier.
The real question I have is this: would d.o. allow for embedding videos, using emfield/media mover or some other means? And, can we use taxonomy to categorize and display the videos (right now it seems to be done solely through the book module)? If so there really is no problem having videos show up on more than one section, and it would make categorizing by type, level of expertise, learning track, etc. relatively easy (though it would still require someone to do the categorizing).
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Blip!
Blip is certainly better because:
A more complete comparison (in favour of Blip) may be read at http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/12/10-reasons-why-bliptv-is-better-than....
José San Martin
Chuva Inc. | Southern Drupal
Blip and Media Mover
Patrick has created a Blip module for Media Mover- http://drupal.org/node/238666
http://24b6.net
Yes we can
Well I believe this will be possible in docs.drupal.org. With the idea of a subsite per "realm" of d.o, we will have much more flexibility in features we want for a section. At this point it is not exactly clear what those boundaries are and who makes the decisions but these features already "exist" on d.o. We will just have more control over them (e.g. we can monkey with the taxonomy more.) Currently embedding videos can happen if you use the embed tag and have the proper input format rights on d.o. I think a move to CCK fields isn't out of the question.
I still see challenges in gathering the videos together and referencing them throughout the handbook in a way that is not manual-labor intensive but let's keep hammering out what the goal is (for all of docs.d.o, not just the video part.) That said, we should probably move this discussion off here and into the proper channel over at the Redesign group where folks are starting to put there heads together on this stuff. Jose also posted a link in that group to the new thread on a Knowledge Base so I think we should roll there.
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It's crossposted there...
It is crossposted at the redesign group.
As far as manual labor goes- I'd definitely prefer the labor of tagging things correctly that are being automatically pulled from feeds to the labor of manually posting items and then tagging them. So- can we get some feedapi/emfield love going? ;-)
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Whoops - sorry I didn't see
Whoops - sorry I didn't see the cross-posting. Already way ahead of me, you are. :-) And yes, I definitely want to move in the direction of aggregation. Getting folks to manually add their stuff is never gonna get us half of what we want.
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An example of a Video Page...
This is a pretty crude example of what we could do with emfield, FeedAPI, FeedAPI_Mapper, Views, etc.:
http://zivtech.com/videos
I'll post a handbook page on this over the next few days, and who knows, maybe I'll even do a Dojo session on it. ;-)
The way that we can avoid trying to load too much on one page is by using thumbnails for listings, and only show the videos on the video's full node. We could send people off site, but I really, really don't think this is necessary nor desirable. If we need to figure out a way to get the video to load last on the page, we can probably do that, but I don't understand how YouTube hanging would have any effect on any other http request on d.o. at all.
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Let's hear it for handbook pages!
I'd love to see more handbook pages on video stuff and really try to help identify what video/rich media modules play which roles- it'd be great if you wrote up a recipe!
http://24b6.net
Will do...
I'll also be playing around a lot more with Media Mover for a work project over the next few weeks- is there anyplace I could help in documenting MM?
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
You'd be my hero!
I'd love it if you did some work on documentation, that'd be fantastic! I was thinking of making a handbook page myself with an overview of what media mover is and then some recipes. I posted some crib notes from a presentation I did at Drupal camp here: http://barcamp.org/DruTubeNotes That's a pretty basic recipe for Drupal -> S3 for video. I think there will be video of the presentation as well which could prove useful (I'll post a link if it appears) ... not sure. So if you'd like to collaborate or take the lead on building some documentation, that'd be a huge push forward for people I think.
http://24b6.net
Keep in mind that Youtube
Keep in mind that Youtube and Google are known for having lag time when the net is congested. If you plan to put several videos on a tag/term and load/embed them all on the same page, it could take a while for the page to load. That could mean the rest of the d.o content may not load until those videos are loaded. I can't comment on other video platforms as I don't use them enough. But youtube / google do have serving issues.
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Yeah, I agree.
My thought would not necessarily be to embed all videos, nor have it be the default. It could be used for special highlight cases or such. I'm not all that familiar with embedding and what all is going on but if the page can load with thumbnails and only load the video when you go to play it, that should help lag.
Lullabot loves you
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standardisation
Either a thumbnail from the video, or just a default icon instead in the theme layer ought to help with lag, or just not displaying the video in the teaser to start with.
I think it'd help a lot of we had one standard way to embed videos (like emfield) - makes it easier to organise and find video stuff compared to manual tagging/linking. It also reduces the issue of having video posted in a dozen different places if people can watch them directly on the page they're referenced from.
bigger picture
My cursory reading looks like you can embed from a service (like blip or youtube.) My concern here is what about videos that are not provided by a service, like, for instance videos on Lullabot.com or blogs where folks have simply uploaded locally?
I'm also not clear how emfield makes it easier to organize "compared to manual tagging/linking." Whether you are adding a link to page or embedding, you still need to manually do it. Yes, I do agree that if I'm on a page about x and there is a video about x I can watch right in the page rather than going to another page, that increases ease of use, but that isn't necessarily cutting down on manual work to get it there to begin with. AFAIU someone still needs to a) figure out which page(s) it should be embedded on, b) find out what the embed link is (if it exists) and then c) add the field to the page.
If we are going to aggregate from the services and during aggregation Drupal makes nodes and takes care of that part for a central video list, that is great, but I don't see how we can automate integration into the handbook pages themselves. So I think we have a few parts to this puzzle (as my slightly fuzzy viewpoint gives.)
I am totally not harshing the idea of embedding videos but I just want to keep an eye on the overall process and benefits and keep track of all our use cases. I also do agree that if we are embedding we should have a standard way of doing that of course. Again, I am really not familiar with the tech in this arena so feel free to roll your eyes and school me. :-)
Lullabot loves you
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workflow
A cck field for video lets us do things like filter views dependent on whether the field is populated or not (like imagefield's 'has image' filter). Then when you add taxonomy, you get nice urls like docs.drupal.org/video/tutorials docs.drupal.org/video/theming. The idea is that adding the video itself would be the only manual thing - as opposed to the additional step of adding a 'video' term or whatever if using a filter. Not much less manual, but a little bit.
For workflow, something like this
NB. my.drupal.org does this for all *.d.o and planet content so this is generic except for the video aspect. The idea is the hard work is centralised to one subdomain, and the rest of *.d.o (also the higher traffic more public facing bits) consume that service as clients.
I need to start a my.drupal.org thread to thrash this out more and have people tell me I'm smoking crack.
PS. I have no idea about non-service remote videos, never actually used emfield.
A few responses...
In regards to custom video urls, emfiled does in fact support this, though it doesn't always work as expected. But- how many people are hosting their own videos these days? Not many, and in fact crossposting at a d.o. site might eat up your bandwidth in short order, so I think pushing people to use Blip.TV or YouTube would be best (or any provider that provides rss feeds of videos).
To add to catch's points about emfield vs. manual embeds, emfield also lets you:
- have multiple sizes, plus a thumbnail, and show whichever one you like based off of a view or the content type's settings.
- stay on top of the latest embedding methods and alter if needed (we'll probably be adding swfobject_api support soon to fix some of the problems caused by
the great satan'sMicrosoft's craptastic IE.- you can always use the latest players (so, for example, when Blip.TV gets us the code for their new player, we can automatically update every node that displays a blip video)
- and, maybe most importantly for what I am suggesting: it will allow us to map feed items to embedded video fields.
Now, it could be argued that it wouldn't save anyone time to have the videos already embedded someplace on d.o. waiting to get tagged, but I don't think that's true. Really anyone with proper permissions could look through the feed, pick an item that they thought was relevant to something they were working on, and reference the video or add a tag or something (would depend on whether we could use node references or not). And, I think you'd get quite a few subscribers if there was a multimedia feed similar to the planet, where people specifically tagged things on their own site as "Drupal Video Planet" or something. (Oh, we can also pull taxonomy terms from their sites, which may or may not be helpful).
And catch, no need to start a new thread to get people to tell you that you're smoking crack, because you are, in fact, smoking crack. ;-)
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Just to be clear
My points have to do with embedding in other handbook pages on the site, not the actual video node itself. I totally get embedding there and yes, the feed stuff, pulling in, etc I'm cool with. My points are all about how to then refer to those spiffy embedded video nodes from elsewhere in the site. The idea of node reference is not something I'd thought of but would definitely make it easier.
Also when I actually thought a little (novel idea to me sometimes) I also realize that even if folks aren't hosting in a service they are most likely going to have a feed, like Lullabot does, so folks like planet folks can request to have their Drupal-specific video feed added to the video aggregator. I agree that people that can't provide a feed for processing should be encouraged to use a service then.
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What about a "related videos" block?
One of the cool features I noticed on the scratch.d.o. site was a cool block that showed "related conversations" when you looked at a project. Seems like this might be a good way to display videos next to info that is related to it...
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Pivots module
That is the pivots module I believe. I don't know anything about how it works or could be configured but it would be an interesting use and save us from manually pointing to stuff. Cool.
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Loading...
I assume you mean for the person viewing that page and not for d.o. on the whole, but if I'm mistaken can you please explain how this is possible?
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Docs.Drupal.Org!
Hello,
Please read the proposal for Drupal Knowledge base: http://groups.drupal.org/node/10223
I think the best would be just docs.drupal.org, which would integrate Handbooks, Tutorials, Videocasts and also a digg-like website to gather all good tips that are posted everyday in Drupal-related blogs around the world.
What d'you think? Please discuss at http://groups.drupal.org/node/10223
Regards!
Zé San Martin
Chuva Inc. | Southern Drupal
Embedded video licenses?
This is just a random thing that popped into my head earlier today. I'm not up on license stuff so I wondered if embedding (vs linking off to) a video that does not match the handbook license (CC-by-SA) causes any issue?
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Szeged Session?
If anyone in this group is coming to Szeged and would be interested in a BoF session on this topic, please let me know. I may propose one either way, but it would be good to know how much interest there is...
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
BoF
Hi Alex - Did this session happen?
Not at Szeged
...but I did do a demo for how to do this at DrupalCamp NYC a few weeks back.
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
I think video.d.o is a good idea
I like the ideas of bringing the external sources/efforts into sub-domains to prevent further fragmentation and consolidate links to make official hubs which our local members can be pointed to.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
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