Manage your digital assets with Bynder and Drupal 8

Modular architecture of the Drupal 8 media ecosystem has become a standard. If you want to build media related editorial experience modules like Entity browser, DropzoneJS and Media entity are the way to go. They can effectively handle locally hosted media, but they are not limited to that. Recently we implemented a module that integrates with the Bynder DAM and lets you use its assets directly in a Drupal 8 site.

Bynder offers its clients a friendly and powerful digital asset management tool to centrally manage all their digital assets. With its feature set, friendly and intuitive UI and central delivery of assets it is a great answer for the unified management of your marketing and branding materials.

Bynder approached us with their need to integrate their DAM application with Drupal 8. They wanted to provide their clients the ability to access the assets directly from their website and to use them in a centralized manner. 

Drupal 8 media ecosystem to the rescue

The Drupal 8 media ecosystem was designed with exactly this kind of use cases in mind. While modules like Entity browser and Media entity are able to handle locally hosted media perfectly fine they start to shine when you present them with challenges of this kind.

Media entity allowed us to represent Bynder assets in Drupal without actually copying them over. Yet, its powerful metadata API allowed us to expose and use all information about them in the context of a Drupal website. The end result of this is a perfect compromise between central management of assets and their full availability on sites that consume them.

The Entity browser module on the other hand allowed us to implement a friendly interface that allows users to browse their Bynder assets from the editor perspective of their Drupal site.

And this is not all! If the right assets are not managed in the Bynder DAM yet there is a possibility to use the DropzoneJS driven widget to upload them into it directly from the Drupal site.

Remote delivery and display of assets

Bynder wants to provide a truly centralized asset management experience. This means that there should be no local copies of assets. This way we avoid the need to do updates on multiple sides (Bynder DAM & Drupal website). 

In order to support this we implemented a custom formatter for Drupal that communicates with Bynder and displays the assets using its CDN servers.

Successful collaboration

The project was a big success - not only from the technical but also from the organizational perspective. We used an agile approach with constant communication between Bynder and MD Systems. 

We used our extensive experience to consult the client and propose solutions that we felt will work the best with Drupal. And the Bynder team supported us when it came to questions about domain knowledge, the product itself and its application programming interface (API). The quality of collaboration that we had clearly shows competence, experience and true professionalism on both sides.
 

Integrate your service

If you want us to support you with integrating Bynder or any other DAM system into your Drupal website, we are the perfect fit! Get in touch and we’ll be happy to present our services and answer your questions.