Chandan Singh

Drupal Media in GSoC 2015

Fri, 05 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Drupal Media in GSoC 2015

Drupal Media has benefited from Google Summer of Code in the past. Last year one project under Drupal was directly a part of the Media Initiative - Entity Embed module for Drupal 8. I was that lucky student who got this wonderful opportunity to work under the mentorship of Media Initiative leads - Dave Reid (davereid) and Janez Urevc (slashrsm) but that’s a story from the past and you can read more about it in this blog post. In this post I’ll talk about the participation of Drupal Media in GSoC 2015.

3 Projects from Drupal Media, woot!

This year is turning out to be a great one for the Media Initiative in Google Summer of Code. We proposed three projects this year - all for Drupal 8 - and all of those were accepted and we managed to get three outstanding students. We take pride in telling everyone that not only all three students are Core contributors, they have also contributed to one or more Media modules already.

Now I would like to introduce the three students:

Jayesh Solanki (jayeshsolanki). Jayesh is a GSoC 2014 alumnus and last year he successfully ported Disqus module to Drupal 8. This year, he will be assisting with the development of Entity Browser. Entity browser is a module for Drupal 8 that tries to provide powerful and flexible framework for searching & selecting of entities. If you want to follow the development of this module or project, all the development will be happening in this Github repository. Janez Urevc (slashrsm) will be mentoring this project.

Prateek Mehta (prateekMehta). Prateek will be working on developing URL embed module for Drupal 8. This project aims to build a framework for CKEditor which would allow an end-user to display an embedded representation of a URL, the content of the URL can be a video, images, rich text or a link. This framework will handle URLs from various third party sites and essentially replace oEmbed module from Drupal 7. For more details, refer to this architecture discussion. Currently, the development is happening in this Github repository but this will change soon when we get a new namespace on Drupal.org (don’t worry, we’ll keep you posted). Dave Reid (davereid) and I will be mentoring this project.

Yuvraj Singh (root_brute). Yuvraj will be working on develop Embed module for Drupal 8 which will be an API level module. The idea of this project is to abstract the buttons, embed form, and display plugins from Entity Embed module into a generic Embed module that can be used by both Entity Embed, URL Embed, and other embeddables in Drupal 8. For more details, refer to this architecture discussion. If you want to follow the development of this module or project, all the development will be happening in this Github repository. Dave Reid (davereid) and I will be mentoring this project.

We have high hopes from all these three projects and hope that all of these will finish successfully on schedule and I’m very happy to tell you that all the signs are pretty good so far.

Looking forward to an exciting summer of code.

Summary of Google Code-In 2014 and Welcome GSoC 2015

Mon, 16 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0000

tl;dr Quick links

Google Code-In 2014 results: http://google-opensource.blogspot.in/2015/02/google-code-in-2014-welcome-to-winners.html
Google Summer of Code announcement: https://groups.drupal.org/node/456563
Google Summer of Code Task Wiki: https://groups.drupal.org/node/455978
Relevant groups to join: https://groups.drupal.org/google-summer-code and https://groups.drupal.org/google-code-in
Getting started guide for GSoC students: https://www.drupal.org/node/2415225

And that’s a wrap for Google Code-In 2014

As you might be knowing, Drupal recently participated in Google Code-In 2014, which is a contest for high school students aged 13-17. We received great participation from students all around the world and they heavily contributed to Drupal during past couple of months. I served as one of the organization administrators for Drupal and had the wonderful opportunity to mentor these students and watch their transformation from complete newbies to Core contributors.

Tons of Core issues worked upon, lots of documentation created/updated and a bunch of modules ported - yes, that’s what GCI meant for Drupal. For a more comprehensive list, you can look at the complete lists of tasks on Melange. Although all the participants did great, there are a few who stood apart from the others.

Getulio Sanchez (gvso) [Grand Prize Winner]. Among other tasks, he ported a bunch of interesting modules to Drupal 8 - FB Like Button, Login Destination, Administer Users by Role, Delete All to name a few. He also writes about his experience with Drupal in GCI and also why he chose Drupal on his blog: https://conocimientoplus.wordpress.com/2015/02/07/what-google-code-in-and-drupal-meant-to-me/. Its a good read especially for students who’re interested in working with Drupal in GCI/GSoC.
Tasya Rukmana (tadityar) [Grand Prize Winner]. She rocked the Core issue queue and went on to become 2500th Core contributor (Albeit it was sheer luck, it was a nice motivation for her any way):

#Drupal 8 now has over 2500 contributors! Congratulations tadityar https://t.co/T2PdgbML0a on becoming the 2500th D8 contributor on Dec. 9.
— xjm (@xjmdrupal) December 12, 2014

Read more about her experience on her blog post: http://tadityar.web.id/2015/02/04/my-google-code-in-experience-with-drupal/.

Akshay Kalose (akshaykalsoe) [Runner up]. Besides reviewing some of the GSoC 2104 projects and contributing to the issue queue, his most important task was to Set up a Drupal 8 installation using Load Balancing(using HAProxy) and you can read more about this on his blog post: http://www.kalose.net/oss/drupal-8-rdf-ui-schema-org-mappings/.
Our other two finalists were: Ilkin Musaev (Polonium) and Mark Klein (areke) who also did great.

Congratulations to all the finalists and prize winners!

Welcome Google Summer of Code 2015

While was GCI was a lot of fun, its over now. To keep the momentum going, we’ve decided to apply as an organization into GSoC again. To stay tuned for further updates regarding GSoC, join our discussion group here: https://groups.drupal.org/google-summer-code. If you or any of your friends/colleagues have an idea and/or want to mentor a project in GSoC 2015, please add that information to our GSoC 2015 Task Organization wiki.

We’d like to apply with at least 30 solid ideas and the deadline is 20th February (which is about 8-9 days from now), please add your ideas before 18th February, so that we’ve some time to review them before we submit them to Google. Even if you’re not available as a mentor, please share the ideas page (https://groups.drupal.org/node/455978) to help make Drupal more AWESOME for everyone.

If you’ve any issues/doubts, feel free to contact me or Matthew Lechleider (Slurpee) or directly either via our contact page or via comments below. You can also ask any questions on our IRC channel: #drupal-google on Freenode.

For Students: where to start

All the instructions that you need are documented here: https://www.drupal.org/node/2415225 but following is a short summary of most important stuff.

If you’re a student reading this post, the first thing that you need to do is join our GSoC discussion group. Also, feel free to hangout on our IRC channel: #drupal-google. Even if don’t have any specific doubts at the moment, just keep irc open in one window and try to follow the discussion if it interests you (whenever you can). If you want to start contributing to Drupal, you can go through the official Getting Involved Guide. Since the amount of text might be overwhelming to start in this guide, the above mentioned link should suffice you immediate needs.

The most important thing is that you should try to connect with mentors as much as possible so that you can discuss/refine your ideas further. If you find an idea in the Task Organization Wiki which interests you, feel free to contact the mentor either via mail or on IRC. If you’ve any interesting idea that you’d like to propose for GSoC, you can also add those to the wiki but you need to contact the admins first. If you’d like to read some tips for GSoC application, you can read my last post: http://chandansingh.net/blog/tips-google-summer-code-0. Best of luck!

Tips for Google Summer of Code

Fri, 23 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Google Summer of Code 2015 is approaching and few people started asking me about how to get selected in GSoC 2015 and where to start. So I though to go ahead and write a blog post so that others can also benefit. This post targets students who have never participated in GSoC before and want to know how to get started with the application process and open source in general.

What is Google Summer of Code? How it works?

The GSoC FAQ page should suffice to answer most of your queries and I strongly suggest to go through it before looking anywhere else for answers.

Google Summer of Code is a program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source projects. We work with many open source, free software, and technology-related groups to identify and fund projects over a three month period. Since its inception in 2005, the program has brought together over 8,500 successful student participants from over countries and over 8,000 mentors from 109 countries worldwide to produce over 55 million lines of code.

So, basically this is how it works:

Different orgs (open source organizations) submit their applications to be part of the program and Google chooses about 190 of those based on their application and past record.
Once the orgs are selected, the list will be available on Melange. Each org will have an ideas list and a homepage.
You need to choose one of the ideas from the list on the ideas page and submit your proposal. (Details on this below)
Then you wait for Google to announce the list of selected proposals. If you find your proposal there, then the hardest part is over and now you code with your org for about three months and complete the proposed project.
If everything went smoothly so far, you’ll get a handsome paycheck for your contribution and you’d have learnt a lot about your project, org and open source.

There are so many orgs, which one do I choose?

This is probably the single most asked question every year around this time. The answer is pretty straightforward if you’re already involved with any open source organization and want to continue work with the same org, then go for that one. If the answer to the previous question is no (which might be the case for most of you reading this post), then you need to choose a few orgs from the list of all accepted orgs. Although you will finally work with only one org, it might be a nice idea to select 1-3 orgs to which you may submit your proposals. You can shortlist the orgs based based on tags, for example if you’re familiar with C++, you can filter the orgs which have the C++ tags mentioned on Melange.

If the org list of this not out yet, you can look at the list of orgs which participated in GSoC last year. For instance, you can take a look at the list of orgs which took part in 2014 and 2013. Filter the orgs based on the tags you’re either familiar with or want to work on. Orgs which participated in previous years and took in more than a couple of students are more likely to get accepted again this year. Based on this and your favorite tags, you filter out 1-3 orgs.

After this, the next task is to go through the idea list for those orgs and decide what ideas interest you most. If you don’t fully understand the ideas, it’s completely fine and the next step will be to get your doubts cleared up by contacting the org and/or the mentor of the task (more on this in the next section).

Okay, I’ve decided an org and project idea, what do I do next?

Once you’ve decided what project idea interests you most and some parts of the description are either unclear to you or you want to clarify a few details, you should get in touch with the task mentor and the organization in general. All the orgs have a contact section on Melange which will tell you how to contact the org. Most orgs prefer communication either via IRC or mailing lists so you can get in touch with the org. You can also ping the task mentor in IRC or mail him to clarify any doubts that you might have regarding the project.

Although its not compulsory, its usually a good idea to contribute to the org before sending your proposal. In order to that, you can ask questions like “Hey I’m new here, can anyone help me get started on how to contribute.” either on IRC or the mailing lists. Since orgs get asked such questions very frequently, many of those have a ‘Getting Started’ page and if it’ll be very helpful if you find that page and follow the instructions. If you’ve any doubts don’t hesitate to ask those. Mentors are generally nice people and will help you through.

How to start contributing

Contributing to an org means either helping to fix bugs (issues), writing documentation or doing testing etc. All the orgs use an issue tracker to keep track of their issues/bugs and most of those orgs have a novice/beginner/quick-fix tag which lists tasks which are easy to fix for beginners. You can get more info on that by contacting the org. Contributing to open source is fun and if you’re not having fun, you’re doing it wrong.

Writing a good proposal

Once you’ve finalized the project idea, and have got started contributing to the org, the next and the most important step is to write a proposal. Many orgs have a application template of sorts and if your org has one, you need to follow that. Otherwise, you can start by specifying your personal information and then moving on to project description. Following are a few tips for writing your project proposal:

Include a detailed timeline based on how you intend to complete the project.
Make sure to list any bugs you’ve worked on and/or links to your contributions.
Double, actually triple check for spelling mistakes.
Don’t forget to mention your contact info.
Last but not the least, don’t forget to update Melange with your latest proposal.

Once your proposal is ready, you can ask the task mentor (and/or the org admin) to review it before you submit it finally to Melange. Ask them if you could explain any parts of it in a better manner and follow up on their feedback. The most important part is really understanding the project idea and reflecting that in your proposal.

Some Do’s and Don’ts

Following are some miscellaneous tips for communicating with your org in a better manner:

Don’t ask to ask: Don’t hesitate to ask any questions and its much better than asking something like “Hello! I ran into an isuue, can anyone help me?” Instead you’re more likely to get a helpful answer by asking your real question instead of asking to ask your question.
Be patient and don’t spam: Once you’ve asked your question, wait for some time for someone to answer it. Its not a good idea to spam the channel again and again with the same question at short intervals.
Mentors are humans (and volunteers): After mailing a mentor, at least wait for 48 hours for them to reply. You need to understand that they are humans and most of them contribute in their volunteer time.
Use proper English language: Its really not a good idea to use SMS language while communicating on IRC or mailing lists. Also, note that excessive use of question marks is frowned upon. Although you need to be respectful, but addressing mentors as Sir/Ma’am is not such a great idea.

Final words

If you follow the steps mentioned above sincerely, you’ll have a great chance of getting selected into GSoC this year. If you have any doubts, feel free to ask those in comments below.

PS: A little background about me

I was a Google Summer of Code student with Drupal in 2014 and mentor for Drupal in Google Code-In 2014.

Google Code-In 2014 starts now

Mon, 01 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Google Code-In (GCI) just started. For those of you who are not aware of this program, its a contest where students (ages 13-17) work on tasks for Drupal (and other open source open source organizations).

In case you want to get involved with GCI, join #drupal-google on Freenode and we’ll help you out after that. If you’re a high school student of age 13-17, lots of interesting tasks await you at Drupal (http://www.google-melange.com/gci/org/google/gci2014/drupal). If you want to sign up as a mentor, register at http://www.google-melange.com/gci/homepage/google/gci2014 and request Mentor role from Drupal.

Post from Google kicking off GCI 2014 @ http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2014/12/3-2-1-code-in-inviting-teens-to.html. Original post by Matthew Lechleider (Slurpee) on gdo: https://groups.drupal.org/node/450953.

GSoC Reunion Summit 2014 from my point of view

Mon, 10 Nov 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I was very lucky to be provided with wonderful opportunity of attending GSoC 2014 Reunion Summit as a Drupal delegate. The event was celebration of ten-year anniversary of Google Summer of Code program. It was an amazing event and also my first trip to the states. I had very high expectations from this event and was very excited to attend it, and I was not disappointed after I did. I totally enjoyed my time there and will try to describe my experiences in more detail below. I’ll stick to a chronological order to describe my experiences since that makes it easier for me to recollect all the things that were going on.

23rd October

The long flight to San Francisco

My journey to the states started when I boarded flight to London from Hyderabad airport on the morning of 23rd (according to local time). It was a long 10 hour journey but I was accompanied by two of my friends who were also coming for the Reunion summit. From London, we had another 10 hour flight to San Francisco. While waiting at the London airport, we saw a couple of guys walking around in GSoC t-shirts. Without missing a chance to socialize, we asked them if they were also going to attend the Reunion and obviously the answer was yes. Slowly, we realized that the entire boarding area was flocked with nerds from all around the world. We boarded the flight after few introductions and it was a pleasant journey thereafter.

San Jose Marriott, webchick and more socializing

The plane landed at the SFO airport late in the evening and we checked in at the Marriott an hour later. I was a bit of late to check in and apparently they ran out of normal rooms at that point of time so they upgraded me to a Deluxe room at no extra cost which was pretty cool. At this point, I was pretty tired to do anything else apart from crashing on the bed but strong desire to see Angie Byron (webchick) ASAP kept me awake. Finally I met Angie who was in a ‘Big Blue Drupal’ t-shirt. It was really great to finally see her in person. It was interesting to meet another fellow Drupaler Dhruv Baldawa(dhruvbaldawa) there.

There was also a dinner planned that night, but by the time I got there only dessert counters were still open. But who cares whether or not other counters are open anyway when desserts are still being served. After that it was time for some more socializing. Meeting folks from various different projects such as Libre Office, Sahana, OSGeo, PHPMyAdmin among others was also very interesting. Our topics of discussion ranged from organizational structure of large organizations to heavy metal music so it was quite a bit of fun. After some time, I slowly disappeared from the Grand Ballroom of Marriott and went to sleep.

24th October

Trip to Great America

Just after the breakfast, we boarded shuttles to the Great America amusement park. While in other amusement parks, the problem is the long queue for the rides, the major problem there was to identify whether or not a ride was open that day. This was because of the fact that the park was closed for common public that day. Yes, you heard me right - Google had booked the entire park that for the Reunion attendees which was pretty awesome. That also meant free access to the Arcade and we all got a chance to show off their skills on the Pacman and other games. After having a satisfying lunch, we headed back to the hotel.

Dressy Dinner Reception

After a downtime of a few hours, it was time for the Dinner Reception. The schedule said that we had to be in dressy outfits and of course everyone had a different interpretation of what dressy meant. For some, it meant not wearing shorts and beach t-shirts and for some, it meant wearing their Halloween costumes. The reception was held at the Tech Museum which had a bunch of geeky exhibits including an ‘Earthquake Room’.

Google had organized few sessions and the speakers included Chris DiBona, Alfred Spector, Peter Norvig, Dirk Hohndel and drumroll Linus Torvalds. Since, the speakers were not announced beforehand, it was a big surprise to see Linus there. Everyone practically stood in line to get a picture with him. Though I didn’t managed to get a selfie with him, it was still awesome to see him.

25th October

Followed by an opening session by Carol, it was time for the un-conference sessions. Then came the part I was most looking forward to, the un-conference sessions.

Our session

Me and Angie had also proposed a session titled: ‘Making your project more approachable to new contributors: Discuss strategies regarding how to help new contributors get started with your open source project’ (which by the way was the most voted session on the Moderator forum for sessions). We tried to make our session more like a discussion instead of we just walking though some slides. To get the discussion started, we talked about some of the strategies we use at Drupal to help new contributors. And then, we asked others to discuss any problems or ideas they come across working on their open source projects. Since I was a recent newcomer to Drupal and Angie was an experienced Drupalista, we could present the both sides, i.e mentor and metee. It was a pretty interesting discussion overall and I got to know about various new techniques. Slides/Notes from our session: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1QAhm2f3x7ub-Cz61Hdu79Fs3DjNpro1KpDpQsyncBRI

Drupal and Plone get together

Just after our session, someone asked me “Are you cs_shadow” and I was like “…..Yes!?”. Then I came to know that he was David Bain (@pigeonflight), a rockstar Plone developer. He was a friend of Varun Baker (@varunity) who had specially asked him to get a pic with me and Angie. That was a very sweet gesture on his part and here’s that pic with all of us smiling:

After our session, I went attended some other sessions such as best practices for open source documentation, codejam session and feedback session for Melange and GSoC.

GSoC 10 year t-shirt wall

The OSPO team had put up t-shirts from all the 10 years of GSoC on display which was pretty cool. We all were discussing in front of it that who has how many of those. I pointed out that I had that one, Angie said she has ‘that, that and that one’. Then someone came and said that he had 8 of those and we all went Wow. Here’s a pic of the wall:

26th October

That morning, we went to visit the Googleplex and had a semi-guided tour of the campus including the Android lawn statues. When we came back to the hotel, there were a few more sessions. But the the most interesting session was the ‘Lightning Talks’ where basically people had to showcase an awesome project in just a few minutes.

After the lunch, it was time for the closing session by Carol, which was followed by a much deserved standing ovation to the entire OSPO team, including Carol, Stephanie, Cat and others. After the session, they gave all of us a Google Cardboard which was very cool.

Quickly after that, we had to catch our shuttles, so I said goodbye to Angie, who had to catch a plane. And since I planned to stay around for a few more days, I went off to my hotel in San Francisco.

27th October onward

The Summit was officially over but I had planned to stay around for a little more so that morning I went to visit the Golden Gate Bridge area. I got a chance to meet Matthew Lechlieder (@Slurpee) and it was pretty nice to finally meet him person after those long IRC chats. Here’s a pic of me and Slurpee at the Fishermen’s Wharf:

To sum it all up, it was an awesome trip to the States and a big thanks to everyone who provided me this wonderful opportunity.

Locked and loaded for GSoC Reunion summit

Wed, 17 Sep 2014 00:00:00 +0000

GSoC 2014 is over and it was a great summer for me. As a student, I lead the development of Entity Embed module for Drupal 8. I learnt a lot about Drupal 8 and the core values of Drupal community. Apart from working on my project, I also got involved with the Media Team and now I’m also trying to contribute to some of the other projects of the Drupal 8 Media initiative. It’s been a fun journey with Drupal so far and I expect it to become even better.

To top it all off, I’ve been selected as a delegate to represent Drupal at the GSoC Reunion summit. Details at the original post on gdo. I’m absolutely delighted that I’ve been selected as one of the delegates given the fact that Drupal os such a big community. What makes it even better is the fact that Angie Byron, (webchick) will be accompanying me at the summit as she’s the other delegate. Its going to be a great chance for me to meet her in person.

I’m all set for the summit. Visa approved, flight & hotel booked. I’m eagerly waiting for this summit and I’m extremely thankful to the Drupal community for providing me with this wonderful opportunity.

Entity Embed module demo

Sat, 02 Aug 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Midterm evaluations for GSoC are over and I've released a short demo for the entity embed module: Introducing Entity Embed module for Drupal 8. This screencast explains the basic idea behind the module and its usage.

It's also time for the status update of what I've been doing for past couple of weeks. Apart from making the demo, a significant amount of work has been done since my last blog post. Some important issues that were solved over past couple of weeks include a much better test coverage, adding a preview of entity in CKEditor, adding support for alignment of embeds, and some code cleanup. Also, travis-ci is now enabled for the github repo so it has become far much easier to run tests on new pull requests and commits.

Check out the video and if you have any issues, feel free to open a ticket on the entity embed issue queue on d.o or contact me directly.

Three weeks down with GSoC: Entity Embed shaping up well

Thu, 12 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post was supposed to come last week, but things got delayed. But here we are and after three weeks of GSoC, Entity Embed module is shaping up pretty good. A lot of interesting things happened last week. To begin with now the module is integrated with CKEditor and the basic UI is looking decent enough. Another major change was that now we support display plugins also, courtsey Dave Reid. This addition has greatly leveraged the scope of this module.

There's another issue that plans to include the functionality of Twig into this module, which will make things more flexible. So, to sum it up this past week was very fruitful for us and we're hoping this week we'll have some more major changes. Our plans include adding a preview, caption etc. Hopefully by the end of next week we'll have a module which we'll be able to brag about.

To track progress of this project, visit the git repo: https://github.com/drupal-media/entity_embed/

GSoC is so much fun, now I'm interested in being a GCI mentor

Thu, 12 Jun 2014 00:00:00 +0000

I'm about to complete four weeks with my GSoC project and its been a great experience. I'm working on the Entity Embed module for Drupal 8. Dave Reid (davereid), Janez Urevc (slashrsm) and Shashwat Srivastava (darklrd) are my mentors for this project and all of them are extremely helpful. Besides my mentors, I'm also recieving excellent support from the Drupal community expecially the Drupal Media Initiative.

Dave already had a prototype ready when I started so I didn't have to start from scratch which was really helpful. Janez always helps me to decide on how to implent new features and to tackle the issues. Florian Weber (webflo) demonstrated how this module can be integrated with CKEditor using an example in very early stages which greatly helped me to accomplish the actual integration. Jibran Ijaz (jibran) and Boris Gordon (boztek) continuously help with code reviews and provide relevant suggestions. Steve Persch (stevector) had developed a similar module with Twig functionality. Now he has filed an issue to include Twig functionality in this module, and once that issue lands the module will be more flexible. There are many other senior contributors who've helped me while I'm working on this module.

Though the learning curve is not very steep, I always learn something new something new almost everyday. To sum it up, it has been a very fun journey so far and I hope the remaining two months will also be the same. Things are going smooth and I'm pretty confident the project will be finished in due time.

The module is live on drupal.org: http://drupal.org/project/entity_embed. Though more recent development can be found on the github repo: https://github.com/drupal-media/entity_embed. Details of all the contributors can be found here: https://github.com/drupal-media/entity_embed/graphs/contributors. Here's what my contribution history on github looks like.

See that large green chunk in the right side, that is the time period of past 4 weeks for which I've been working on this module. And as you can probably see, those 4 weeks are the times when I've been most active and it feels really great to be working on this module along side some of most experienced Drupal contributors.

Since I've recieved such an excellent support and love from the community, I thought its only fair to I give back some of the love. I hang out on the IRC channels are try to help if I can. In the same spirit, I've applied to be a mentor for GCI. I believe this will be a wonderful opportunity for me to help new contributors get started. I've applied to be a mentor and I've my fingers crossed that I'll be selected as one. Regardless of whether I'm selected or not, I'll try to update the task organization wiki for GCI: https://groups.drupal.org/node/357333 as and when I get some interesting ideas.

While I have the chance I want to sum up this post on the future of Drupal 8. Based on my experience with this project, I'll try to comment from a Drupal Media perspective. Firstly, I am firm believer that Drupal is heading towards a "Beyond body field" space. Since, there's an increasing demand of media components by users and users like more media-rich content on their sites. With this kind of a demand, a good set of media modules is really necessary for Drupal 8 and I believe Drupal shuld support better media solutions out of the box. In DrupalCon Austin 2014, there was an excellent talk by Janez and Dave: FILE ENTITY AND MEDIA MODULES | LET'S FIX FILE AND MEDIA HANDLING. (For instance, I should be able to embed this video in my blog using Drupal core out of the box. I hope we'll have such features in core in near future.)

First Week in GSOC: Getting started with Entity Embed

Wed, 21 May 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Its roughly been a week since I've been working on Entity Embed module and about time I provide some updates. We're off to a good start since the module is already functional. Though it still lacks a UI but its working fine in terms of embedding entities through text format. There's a still a lot of work to do including better error handling and providing test coverage apart from the UI but nevertheless, its a pretty decent start in my opinion.

I was lucky that I didn't had to start from scratch thanks to Dave Reid. For the UI part, we're planning to use Entity Browser module which is also part of Drupal Media Initiative. Also, this module is recieving good support by community. Today itself, webflo provided link to a similar module which he integrated with current Entity Embed module. This links has further details: https://drupal.org/node/2271567.

If you have any ideas/suggestions feel free to contact me.