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DrupalEasy Sponsors MediaFront Module Code Sprint

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The first-ever Brevard County Drupal Code Sprint took place on Sunday, December 16, 2012 at the Cocoa Village Civic Center. A total of 12 sprinters attended in-person, along with 2 virtual attendees who joined in via IRC and a Google+ Hangout. The sprint was in support of the MediaFront module, a front-end media solution that provides HTML5-based media players for supported browsers and falls back to a Flash-based player when necessary. The MediaFront module maintainer, Travis Tidwell (travist), could not have been more accomodating and helpful, as he participated in the sprint for 10 straight hours.

The sprint was a success; we were able to improve the MediaFront’s documentation, fix some bugs, perform some structured testing of the module in various operating systems and browsers, and make some progress on several other issues. DrupalEasy was proud to sponsor the sprint, providing the facilities, drinks, and snacks for the participants.

As many of the sprinters were new to the MediaFront module, we started off the day with an overview of the module’s functionality. Travis led a walkthrough that included simple use cases involving uploaded and hosted videos, numerous examples of setting up playlists, as well as some of the advanced features of the module including player-to-player communication.

Once everyone understood the basics of the module and set up a local development/testing environment (consisting of a fresh copy of Drupal 7 and the latest -dev version of the MediaFront module), the sprint participants were split into roughly three groups: documentation, issue queue triage, and testing. As our group of sprinters didn’t include too many hardcore developers, we decided to focus on these three areas.

The documentation group was involved in reviewing the existing documentation, making sure it was up-to-date with the latest version of the module. Many additions and fixes were made to the documentation, including:

Additionally, documentation for two other use cases was started (but not yet published):

  • Using Mediafront with Media, Colorbox, and Media Colorbox modules to allow multiple videos (personal, youtube, and vimeo) to be played in Colorbox popup on the node details page 
  • Adding YouTube videos automatically to a MediaFront playlist using Feeds module.

The issue queue triage group was tasked with going through as many of the 7.x-2.x issues as possible, with the goal of either responding to support requests, trying to duplicated reported bugs, or closing out obsolete issues. A total of 28 issues were closed, with activity on an additional 21 issues.

The last group focused on rigorous testing of the module to ensure that the proper player (HTML5 or Flash) was being used depending on the operating system, browser, and media file to be displayed. Numerous bugs were found and fixed during this process. One of the more important bugs that was squashed was for the case when multiple media files of different formats are uploaded to a multi-valued file field. The MediaFront module now selects the best file format for the browser. For example, when both an .ogv and .mp4 file are available to Firefox, the .ogv file is used to display the video in a HTML5 player. Once all the tests are complete, this compatibility chart will be added to the MediaFront documentation on Drupal.org.

Work was also done on various miscelleanous tasks:

  • Squashed bug with jQuery UI version discrepancies
  • Outlined future enhancements for better interoperability with Media module’s file entities

Overall, both the participants and the maintainer were happy with the results. The participants were able to dive deep into the module’s functionality (with Travis available all day to answer any and all questions), contribute back to the community, and sharpen their skills, Travis was able to take advantage of a significant number of people helping to improve one of his modules. We’ve already started talking about the next Brevard County Drupal Sprint (although we’re thinking about changing the name to the Drupal Mosquito Control, Florida Bug Squad, Florida Bug Zappers, or something similar) for as early as next month - everyone is excited to continue their work with the MediaFront module and to give back to the Drupal community! 

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