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Aaron Winborn's Drupal Multimedia (Packt, 2008) documents one of Drupal's most obvious deficiencies, media management. Drupal's built-in media handling capabilities appear rudimentary if you want to do anything beyond attach files to nodes. This deficiency is intentional and reflects Drupal's modular design, that is, contributed modules can be (and have been) developed to add specific functionality for different types of media. Consequently, Drupal admins need to find and test a lot of modules to identify the ones that best suit their needs. As Winborn says,

Due to the dichotomoy between the light feel of Drupal core and the overwhelming dread of scouring through hundreds of contributed modules, the need has arisen for a book such as this, which will demonstrate how best to create a site that harnesses the power available for multimedia handling. (page 8)

Winborn's book delivers on this promise, covering all the major types of media that users typically want to integrate into their websites. His coverage of integrating images, video and audio is thorough, detailed, and clear, with several chapters on each type. He covers installation and configuration of the Image module and several modules bundled with it (Image Gallery and Image Attach) in sufficient detail to get anyone integrating images into a Drupal site going. He also points out two popular alternatives to the Image module, Acidfree and Gallery, and introduces image manipulation toolkits, clearly describing both the native PHP and ImageMagick options. Choosing which image manipulation option to use on a Drupal site can be confusing (even though the requirement to choose applies to any PHP web application that supports ImageMagick), so discussion of this option is useful. Winborn also covers the Image Assist module in detail and the various options Drupal admins have for providing image integration within the most popular WYSIWYG editors.

Some admins might find that the modules named in the preceding paragraph do not deliver the functionality they need, and Drupal Multimedia includes two chapters, "Developing for Images" and "Theming Images", that provide guidance on moving beyond what these modules can provide. Developers will appreciate the technical coverage of the Image Field and Image Cache modules, which are used in conjunction with other modules. The "Developing for Images" chapter illustrates one of the book's notable qualities: coverage of CCK and Views is integrated into specific topics instead of being covered in isolated chapters. In the book's first chapter, Winborn does provide separate overview sections on both CCK and Views, paving the way for the detailed explanations later on of how these two essential Drupal modules can be used to help solve specific problems. Winborn's detailed explanations of how CCK and Views can be used to provide specific media-related solutions is among the best available in any of the fine books on Drupal.

Coverage of video and audio is not quite as thorough as that of images, but is still very good, with the chapters on video and audio providing useful sections on the most important modules that handle these formats. Winborn makes the useful distinction between third-party and local media, since many Drupal modules integrate content from external sites as opposed to media stored on the local Drupal filesystem. The chief modules for managing video are FileField (for local video) and Embedded Media (for external video) and for audio, the Audio module and FileField (for local audio) and the Embedded Audio module (for external audio).

Theming of images, video, and audio is covered thoroughly. Winborn devotes an entire chapter to theming images and a chapter to theming audio, and includes a detailed discussion on theming video in the Local Video chapter. Like his coverage of CCK and Views, theming is covered in such a way that makes it clear that certain aspects of Drupal are best approached as part of a big picture, not as separate aspects of the application.

Winborn provides a useful chapter on File Asset Management, pointing out that "the Drupal core currently does little to help" with file management (to be remedied in Drupal 7, which has a File API). He identifies the Asset Module and Media Mover family of modules as alternative solutions to Drupal 6's native file management capabilities. He points out that at the time of writing both of these modules were not available for Drupal 6 but at the time of this review (late January 2009) both have at least alpha versions for 6.x. File management is not one of Drupal's most functional subsystems. This weak aspect of Drupal is receiving some attention from the developer community, however. Drupal 7 is going to include a File API that will help integrate contributed modules with Drupal core and with each other. Winborn's chapter on "The Future of Drupal Multimedia" gives us a taste of the Drupal 7 File API and also includes some interesting speculations about other directions that media-related functionality in Drupal might take. A particularly interesting section of this chapter talks about how the user experience for Drupal administrators and content editors needs to evolve if it is to keep up with new media types and new ways of using them. This chapter also discusses "semantic multimedia" and its relation to microformats and World Wide Web Consortium's RDF (Resource Description Framework), the latter of which will become an important underlying technology in Drupal 7. A useful addition to this chapter would have been some mention of additional approaches to file management in Drupal, such as the File Framework, Filebrowser, and DAV modules.

It is difficult to find fault with Drupal Multimedia. The only topic that is notably absent is the integration of executable content such as calculators, games, and wizards into Drupal sites. The book mentions Flash solely as a platform for video and audio players and does not discuss Flash as it is used to provide interactive applications such as those just mentioned. In addition, Java and Silverlight are not mentioned at all. JavaScript, and in particular jQuery, is mentioned frequently, but only with regard to how it is used to support the integration of images, video, and audio into web pages. Discussion of executable, interactive applets is not outside the scope of a book on media integration, particularly when mobile web, virtual reality, and tactile media are given a few paragraphs each.

Drupal is a complex content management systems/framwork and many of its capabilities are difficult to grasp, and therefore frequently misunderstood. Focused treatments of the more obscure of these capabilites are welcome. Drupal Multimedia provides much needed documentation of a complex and often confusing aspect of Drupal. The book's content and style fit its intended audience, and it provides concrete solutions to problems surrounding integrating popular media types. Its forward-looking attitude is refreshing, and appropriate for a book on integrating media into a fast-evolving platform such as Drupal.