The Fishbowl

The Fishbowl is a drupal powered, faith based, non-profit website that recently launched.

fshbwl-fishfood.png

The idea behind the fishbowl is to explore faith from a number of different angles. Each day a new piece of content will come out in one of the 7 different categories. On Mondays it's content about World Views, Tuesday it's the Swim Podcast, etc.

My personal favorites are the Intelligent Faith, which deals with science, logic, and apologetics, and Expressions, which is artistic in nature.

The fishbowl is build with drupal. Along with the usual suspects of contributed modules, the asset module came in real handy.

The Fishbowl was designed by Mustardseed Media and developed by Innovating Tomorrow.

Asset module stable?

It's good to hear asset module being used in production sites. With all the talk of imagefield being integrated into core/image moving into core (?) and other modules such as media mover, do you think asset has a chance to capture the imagination of drupal users and be successful?

I am a bit wary of investing in the asset module because of all this, although the lure of a unified media management tool for drupal is really tempting.

We Will See

First, is asset stable enough? The module is already deployed on http://www.amnesty.org/ and has been for some time. The issues I ran into with the beta code were issues with the initial setup. There were some strange bugs but most of them have been fixed in the 1.x-dev version. Though, I look forward to an official stable release.

As for core... there is an issue to add hook_file to core (http://drupal.org/node/142995) and a working group trying to bring something like CCK into core (only cooler and more functional). I'm not really sure of imagefield or media mover going into core and have not read anything like that recently. Can you point out a reference?

I'd expect that any enhancements to core such as hook_file or CCK type fields going into core to just make asset better. Asset module works with drupals file system and even supports private files. For me the real benefit of the asset module is the permissions on a file and the ease that an author can put images, video, and audio into a node. It's like the IMCE module but better in that aspect. If core changes around or takes the features of a different module file the filefield module I don't see any reason that the asset module can't have a migration path and great UI to support what it's doing right now by better.

Thank you for confirming

Thank you for confirming that the asset module is a lot more stable now.

As for imagefield getting into core, I think it was in the context of a discussion about CCK/parts of CCK getting into core. I remember reading something related to this on some other blog, but I have lost that.

In general, the sense I got reading some of the reports from DrupalCon was that, instead of looking at the asset module as a possible foundation for media management in drupal, the preference was for getting parts of imagefield/image cache into the image module and looking at other modules such as embedded field and so on.

I don't see a problem

I don't really see a problem. The real bonus of the asset module is the interface and ability for a non-geekie author to embed some great content. If something like filefield, imagefield, or some other CCK element goes into core It wouldn't be difficult to move asset in a direction to use them if that were the needed case.

And, don't forget... Asset does two things. First, it does media handling in the flow like IMCE. Second, it is a CCK element.

The media in the flow of a node thing is so important and asset is a great option for that.

The media in the flow of a

The media in the flow of a node thing is so important and asset is a great option for that

Indeed. Like img_assist, but that was only for images. IMCE took that further with fine grained permissions, but Asset extends it even more by combining all of that plus handling diverse media and also being a CCK element to boot.

The only thing that stumped me when I converted Asset into a CCK field was that it sort of broke the 'media in the flow of a node' because one had to create several fields for each media type and then the weighting of the fields determined the order of appearance, not to mention the difficulties with aligning the media elements without a bit of theming. Possibly, I was mistaken about some or all of these because of my rather hasty experimentation.

Thanks again for your insights.