OSTips – Build Your Own Digital Asset Management System in Drupal
You can create your own Digital Asset Management System right inside your Drupal 8 website using nothing but core modules. Watch our video and learn how!
“Welcome to OSTips from OSTraining. My name is Rod Martin and in this video I’m going share with you how to build your own digital asset management system right inside your own Drupal website, using nothing but core modules. Let’s go!
So to create our digital asset management system the first thing you need to do is install the media and media library modules in core under the extend menu.
Next, head over to content and media. I’ve uploaded some media items already just to get us started. While this might be a good start, that’s all it is. We get a thumbnail, a media name and honestly how often do we name our media items well… the type it is, who the author is, status updated, and we get some operations. This isn’t enough for an asset management system by any stretch. Let’s add a taxonomy to it so that we can tag our images with appropriate terms. Easy to do! Head over to structure, taxonomy.
You can either do this through the tag system, but I recommend probably creating your own vocabulary and then defining all of the categories or tags you want for your images videos etc., so that they can be a little bit more controlled. For today, I’m going to just use the tagging system, and I’ve already added some tags: banner, hero office, animals, people.
Also, you might want to create a different taxonomy for videos, images, PDFs.
Next, head over to media types. Now you’ll immediately notice media types are an entity which means they are “fieldable”.
- go to image >> manage fields
- add a field (you know where I’m going with this already)
- grab the taxonomy term field
- call this image tags (That’s going to define the taxonomy just for my image media type)
- choose unlimited
- click Save field settings
We’ll choose the tags vocabulary and again depending on how you want to manage this, should a content editor be able to add new tags on the fly?
Generally I recommend against that simply because then it becomes pretty unwieldy, and you have typos and all other kinds of things. So we’ll leave that unchecked. Save settings.
Well now I can head over to content media, and I can update my image with a new tag.
Kids are one of my tags and people are one of my tags. And there we go. Now again, this doesn’t do us any good here because in this particular layout. We don’t get to see any additional fields.
The next step is to update this view in order to see and filter by the tags that you’ve created. Structure, Views. Now in this case I’m just going to duplicate that media view because I don’t want to really mess this up.
- click duplicate
- add a field called image tags
- add a filter criteria – image tags
- leave as autocomplete
- expose this filter to visitors
- update that label just a little bit
- save
Head back over to content and media, and now you will notice that we’ve got two media tabs here. We could fix that in a little bit I just wanted to get through it quickly.
You’ll note here there are the image tags added to this particular image and of course I can now filter by any tag!
And there you go. Well that’s it! A digital asset management system inside Drupal, using core modules. Now there’s a little bit more to it than that, so I’d encourage you to check out the class below. This is OSTips from OSTraining, thanks for watching, please subscribe. I’m Ron Martin. ”
Learn more about the Drupal 8 Media Module Class here.