No Media in OpenSocial

It's been a challenging sprint. As I mentioned in this blog post, we had to pause our Private Beta in order to rebuild our app on the OpenSocial distribution of Drupal. I think in the end this will be a good decision in order to take advantage of all the great communications features that the OpenSocial team has built over the past five years, but it's proving rather challenging right now because OpenSocial doesn't use Media, which is so central to GreatAlbum.

Challenges with Media Entity Browser

As we've enabled several Media types and tried to implement their use cases, such as selecting the cover image for an Event, Story, Individual or Place from existing media in an album, or allowing you to upload a new media item during that selection process, we've encountered a number of errors with Media Entity Browser (MEB), which we think is the best module to use for this. And for reasons we haven't figured out yet, development of the MEB module has stagnated - only one update in the past two years, and it's stuck on version 8.x-2.0-alpha3. As a result, we're thinking we may have to become the new maintainers of the module in order to fix a number of its shortcomings.

Short-term work around

But, that may take a while to ramp up, so in the meantime we may have to resort to selecting a media item by title to display as the cover media for Albums, Events, Stories, Individuals and Places. That will prove challenging, as a lot of media doesn't actually have meaningful titles (just camera file name). Users will still be able to upload, organize and share media as usual - the core use cases. All of this has slowed down our progress with completing Beta6 sprint.