Inside the Media Management Track of Drupal CMS
As the world of Drupal eagerly anticipates the release of Drupal CMS on January 15, 2025, The DropTimes has been reaching out to key figures shaping the platform’s development. In this special feature, Alka Elizabeth, a sub-editor at The DropTimes, sits down with Tony Barker, a prominent figure in the Drupal community, to provide a glimpse into the future of Drupal and explore his personal journey with the platform.
Tony Barker is a seasoned Drupal Frontend Specialist at Annertech, he is also the Founder of Synechis, a company he established in 2012 with a vision inspired by the potential of open-source platforms like Drupal. With over 15 years of experience in the Drupal ecosystem, Tony has witnessed and contributed to its evolution from version 6 to the forthcoming Drupal CMS, playing a vital role in enhancing media management, accessibility, and user experience.
In this interview, Tony offers insights into his role as the Media Management Track Lead for the Drupal Starshot initiative—an ambitious project aimed at advancing the capabilities of Drupal CMS. He delves into the motivations and objectives behind media management, including the critical focus areas of high-quality media presentation, frictionless editorial workflows, and performance optimization. Through his reflections, readers will gain a clearer understanding of how media management, accessibility, and innovation are being prioritized to ensure Drupal’s long-term success as a leading open-source content management system.
Shaping Drupal’s Next Era: Media Management, Community, and What Lies Ahead
TDT [1]: So the first and obvious question of this conversation would be how did you stumble upon Drupal and what made you stay?
I first came across Drupal about 15 years ago. What initially appealed to me was its structured content. At the time, I was looking for a system to build a publishing community. While that project never got off the ground, I experimented with various systems and discovered Drupal’s database structure and the way it allowed content to be related to one another. I was immediately hooked.
That was my entry point into Drupal. From there, I got to know people in the community, and we eventually started a local meetup. The community was incredibly friendly—full of talented and skilled individuals.
Over the years, Drupal has continued to impress me, both technically and in terms of the positive impact it has. I’ve grown to love it; it’s more than just work—it’s a lifestyle.
I’ve been involved with Drupal since version 6, which I started using in 2009. Back then, we were transitioning from desktop machines to mobile phones and beginning to design responsive websites. I specialize in front-end development.
Since then, there have been significant developments, such as the rise of frameworks like Vue and React. But at the time, even responsive design was a brand-new concept. So, looking back, it’s been 15 years of continuous involvement with Drupal.
When asked how Drupal has evolved as a content management system over these years, I would say it has become far more stable and production-ready, especially for enterprise use.
I remember when I first started, I didn’t have much engineering knowledge and was just figuring things out. But for enterprise-scale websites, Drupal's adoption of tools like Composer to manage code and configuration has been a game-changer. The ability to import configuration and have everything stored in code has been one of the most significant improvements over the years.
Another impressive aspect of Drupal is how it keeps pace with integrations and emerging technologies. As the internet evolves and new channels appear, Drupal evolves right along with them.
Most recently, we’ve seen the integration of advanced AI capabilities. This is just another example of Drupal being at the forefront of innovation — something that would have been unimaginable 10 or 15 years ago.
TDT [2]: You've been with Annertech for more than three years now, almost nearing four years. And you've also founded Synechis. I would like to know more about Synechis and how your involvement with the open source communities like Drupal has influenced the foundation of Synechis.
Synechis is a small company that I founded in 2012. Initially, it had a different name — Orange Punch. Back then, I was collaborating with designers, creating video content, and working on a variety of different projects.
Around six or seven years ago, I decided to shift my focus entirely to the technology side and move away from the creative side. This allowed me to align more with my core skill set, focusing primarily on web development rather than offering a full-service package.
I had known about Annertech for a long time and was familiar with some of their developers through the Drupal community. Annertech is a distributed team based in Ireland and the UK, with developers spread across Europe, including England.
About three and a half years ago, I had the opportunity to join Annertech, and I have thoroughly enjoyed every moment of working with them.
My work has primarily been on their managed services team, where we focus on optimizing and enhancing existing websites rather than building new ones from scratch. This role involves a lot of work on performance improvements and image handling, which ultimately led me into the field of media management.
I have to say, Annertech has been incredibly supportive of Starshot and its contribution efforts. Their support has been nothing short of spectacular.
TDT [3]: A blog post by Stella Power from Annertech has mentioned that "Tony's first task is to do an assessment and propose a recipe or starter kit for a media management solution that will result in better and more intuitive media management". What are they trying to get at here? What are you trying to achieve with the media management track of Drupal Starshot?
The first thing to note is that everything has happened extremely quickly. Dries only announced the initiative in the spring. Shortly after, we had video calls where people discussed the initiative, and that’s when I first got involved. We essentially started with a blank slate, exploring what we could achieve with media management.
Our goals for media management focused on three key areas.
First, media is crucial for creating an emotional connection with website visitors. The way video and images are presented tells a story. If images are blurry or low quality, it detracts from the user experience. So, the primary goal was to ensure high-quality, visually appealing media presentation on the front end.
The second goal was to reduce friction in the editing experience. If uploading files, entering alt text for accessibility, or using the editor is too difficult, it can slow down content creators. Our goal was to make the process as smooth and intuitive as possible for editors.
The third key goal was performance. Page load speed directly affects user engagement, SEO, and accessibility. Large or excessive media files can slow down web pages, so it was essential to ensure fast, efficient media loading. This meant optimizing the system so that mobile users wouldn’t be served large, unnecessary media files that wouldn't even fit on a smaller screen. At the same time, users on larger displays should have access to rich, high-definition media experiences.
These three goals—high-quality presentation, frictionless editing, and optimal performance—were the foundation of our approach to media management.
TDT [4]: How far have you reached?
One thing to note about media is that it’s a vast ecosystem with a lot of components. There are numerous media types beyond just images and videos. This includes social embeds and other niche categories that also fall under the umbrella of "media."
To start, I focused on the most commonly used media types. Images were an obvious choice since nearly every website features images. We wanted to make working with images as seamless as possible. Another priority was remote videos, as many users embed videos from platforms like YouTube and Vimeo.
Our goal was to make these commonly used media types easy to work with while leveraging the existing tools available in Drupal Core and Contrib. We fine-tuned and configured these tools to ensure a smooth integration into the first version of DrupalCMS.
As of this week, we successfully merged the recipe into the beta version of DrupalCMS. This marks the MVP (minimum viable product) stage of the system. The next step is to refine and improve certain aspects of it.
There’s still some work I’d like to do, such as enhancing the filters in the media library and making smaller adjustments here and there. These improvements will be incremental as we continue to refine the system.
Beyond these adjustments, there is a much larger, ongoing effort to explore opportunities for improvement and the development of new recipes and features. We’ve started this process, and the progress is visible in the Drupal.org issue tracker. There’s a dedicated "vision for media management" issue that outlines a growing list of potential opportunities.
The next step will be to prioritize these opportunities. This will involve assessing what's feasible, what requires deeper thought, and what areas might benefit from discussions with the community. By doing so, we can identify the best paths forward.
Looking beyond that, we have the Experience Builder on the horizon. For those unfamiliar, Experience Builder is set to be a new way to manage content. It’s a significant opportunity to innovate and create new possibilities for how users interact with and manage their content within Drupal. This development has the potential to unlock powerful new features and enhance the overall content management experience.
TDT [5]: The media management issue in Drupal.org has a roadmap and we are talking about AI features as well, the assistance of AI features when it comes to image editing or removing the background of a particular image. How important do you think is the role of AI in content management systems like Drupal?
AI has immense potential if used correctly and effectively. It offers a wide range of opportunities to support developers, marketers, and editors by making their work more efficient, effective, and straightforward. It can help present information in more accessible ways, even on topics like accessibility, which might not be obvious or easily addressed through the field UI.
AI can also streamline complex tasks, like adding fields or creating views, which typically require a bit of technical knowledge to configure in Drupal. With AI, these processes could be simplified, allowing administrators to perform them without needing an in-depth understanding of how Drupal works.
This represents a significant opportunity for improvement. For example, you mentioned background removal for images. Currently, I’m not sure how we would achieve this directly in Drupal, but it’s something that’s already available in other content management systems. While I don’t think Drupal needs to become a fully featured image management system, offering the ability to remove image backgrounds would be incredibly useful.
It’s a feature that I believe many people would appreciate, and it would be beneficial for a wide range of use cases. Imagine being able to click a button, and the background is automatically removed — that would be a game-changer for editors and content creators.
Figuring out how to do that within Drupal would be a valuable goal. Fortunately, progress is already being made. Jamie from FreelyGive has been doing incredible work on the AI track. We now have several capabilities and features that allow for automated actions, editor support, and tools to help users find information and complete their work more efficiently.
These advancements are laying the groundwork for even more possibilities in the future.
TDT [6]: Starshot is definitely an ambitious project. There are a lot of innovations happening, there are a lot of updates happening. So even with all these features coming in, how do you make sure that the user experience stays simple and intuitive?
There’s always a balance to be struck between innovation and the quality of the user experience.
For the first version, I took a cautious approach. I focused on including only features that were obvious, widely useful, and non-controversial—features that work well without drawbacks or conflicting requirements. As a result, the first version is simple, easy to use, and highly stable.
That said, we also aim to make rapid advancements, introduce new features, and pursue innovations—even those that we might not yet have all the tools to achieve.
As a community, and especially as the people leading the various tracks of Starshot, we sometimes have to weigh the potential drawbacks of certain features against the speed of progress. In some cases, it may be worthwhile to introduce innovative features as experimental additions. The use of recipes provides a fantastic opportunity to introduce elements that aren't included by default but can still be accessed and utilized by those who want them.
One possible approach would be to clearly label certain features as experimental. This way, we maintain a stable base while also allowing for fast, forward-thinking development. Striking this balance between stability and rapid innovation is essential to progress.
TDT [7]: Accessibility is a very big talk at the moment, everywhere. It's a very big conversation happening in the tech world. How is the work that has been done by the media management track making the entire experience more accessible for the users?
As we discussed earlier, there have been significant changes in web technology and Drupal over the years. In recent times, accessibility has become a critical focus for everyone. Beyond being a compliance requirement, accessibility is a fundamental goal for the open-source community, as we aim to make websites accessible to all users.
Accessibility is already a core part of Drupal—it’s essentially baked into the system. So far, I haven't had to make any major adjustments during the initial configuration stages to achieve accessibility, as Drupal handles much of it out of the box.
One notable advancement we’ve made involves CKEditor, which is incredibly powerful. During my research and evaluation of other content management systems, I noticed a common issue with image cropping. For example, if you have an image of four people and crop it down to only show two, the alt text you originally assigned to the image may no longer accurately describe it. Previously, this would create a mismatch between the visual content and its description.
With CKEditor in Drupal, we’ve been able to address this issue. When you crop an image on the web page, you can now override the alt text for the specific instance of the cropped image. This ensures that the alt text accurately reflects what users are seeing. It’s a simple but powerful feature that greatly enhances accessibility.
This is one of the key differences between Drupal CMS and someone building a site using just Drupal Core. In structured content, developers can configure these features as they go, but with Drupal CMS, we aim to provide these capabilities out of the box for all users.
There’s still work to be done, especially as we build the Experience Builder. Our goal is to ensure that powerful accessibility features are included in the new tools and innovations we introduce. I’m pleased to say that accessibility is already a strong focus, thanks to the collective work of many contributors in both Drupal Core and Contrib.
For my own track, we’re focusing on accessibility improvements, but there is also a dedicated accessibility track. That track has produced tools to scan web pages for accessibility issues, which further enhances the user experience.
When it comes to learning, I’ve realized that I’m not great at focusing on long tutorial series. I learn much better in person.
One of the most effective ways I learn how people use Drupal and how to improve my own skills is by attending conferences like DrupalCon. These events offer workshops and sessions on a range of relevant topics, and I can choose sessions that directly interest me. The best part is that any sessions I miss (because you can’t be in two places at once) are available to watch online later.
This "watch later" option is incredibly helpful for catching up on anything I missed. Local meetups offer a different kind of learning experience. They’re often more discussion-based, where people can talk about specific problems they're facing and share solutions with each other.
I remember when we were first learning to use Composer to manage Drupal projects. The Drupal Yorkshire local meetup was especially helpful, as it gave people a chance to figure things out together and share best practices. Those sessions were essential for smoothing out our workflows and adopting more efficient methods.
From a learning perspective, events like these are vital. But beyond learning, they also serve as a source of inspiration. The experience I had at DrupalCon Barcelona, and at similar events, has left a lasting impact. It happens almost every time I attend one of these events—I leave feeling inspired and motivated to continue the work I’m doing.
Being part of an open-source community where people collaborate to create something greater than the sum of its parts is incredibly rewarding. Whether it's contributing a large piece of work or just a single line of code, seeing so many people work together to achieve something meaningful is deeply inspiring.
This sense of collaboration and shared purpose is what motivates me every single day.
TDT [8]: Will you be attending DrupalCon Vienna next year?
Yes, I definitely intend to be in Vienna. We’re also having discussions about future events.
I recently attended DrupalCamp Scotland, which was a fantastic experience. It was a really enjoyable day. Over the summer, we also had a smaller camp in Wales, held in Anglesey, which was another great event.
Right now, we’re discussing the possibility of organizing a larger camp in England. There’s nothing confirmed yet, but it’s something we’d love to make happen. In the past, we had DrupalCamp London, but due to COVID, many events were postponed, slowed down, or canceled altogether.
So, keep an eye out for potential announcements about a new event—it could be Drupal Camp England or Drupal England, or something along those lines. It would be wonderful to have a larger, in-person gathering again.
On a broader level, I believe initiatives like Starshot, Drupal CMS, and Experience Builder will play a big role in driving engagement. These initiatives can bring in new people— even those who may not know Drupal exists today.
All of these efforts are designed to strengthen the community, increase engagement, and get more people involved. It’s an exciting time, and I think the momentum we’re building with these initiatives is truly brilliant.
TDT [9]: Do you think all the excitement around Drupal CMS and Drupal Starshot is justified? Everyone seems to be talking about Drupal CMS and Drupal Starshot. Do you think the excitement people have is warranted?
Is something happening that's going to change the trajectory of Drupal in the long term? I believe it already is. That said, I would offer a note of caution regarding the early phases, especially since you mentioned the importance of simplicity and delivering a good user experience.
The early versions may not be flashy or visually impressive. I can’t say for certain—people will have to judge for themselves. But I do believe we’re building a strong, solid foundation to build upon, and so far, it’s been done exceptionally well.
Some of the important work is happening behind the scenes. It might not have that "big bang" impact at first, but I think that moment is coming. As we build new features and refine the system, the real excitement will come to life. When the Experience Builder launches, I think everyone’s anticipation will be realized.
I believe the excitement is absolutely justified. We’re already working in a way we’ve never worked before. We're taking a holistic approach to the system, bringing together experts and diverse members of the community to figure out the best ways to approach certain challenges.
We're also looking at Drupal from a fresh perspective. In the past, we may have focused too much on the developer’s point of view. But now, we’re approaching it with a broader perspective, ensuring the experience works well for everyone.
TDT [10]: You've been involved with Drupal for 15 years now, so what do you think is your proudest contribution to the community?
Well, I think there are two things that stand out. First, being involved with Drupal CMS has been an incredible experience. It’s truly an honor to be part of it, and I’ve had a lot of fun working with people from various tracks.
I'm especially proud of what we’ve been able to achieve, not least because we’ve done it in such a short amount of time. One of the biggest challenges has been working with the recipe system, which is still relatively new and something I had never used before. Building Drupal CMS using a system with multiple interdependent recipes has been quite complex, but seeing it come together has been incredibly rewarding.
The second thing I’m proud of is being part of the team at Annertech. I don’t know if you’re familiar with LocalGov Drupal, but it’s a project that started in the UK with the goal of building websites for local government organizations, like council websites.
It’s a brilliant initiative. We’ve managed to create an open-source system where these websites can share common features, making it much easier for councils to set up and manage their sites. It makes perfect sense to have a system that provides all the core functionality councils need right out of the box.
Being involved in LocalGov Drupal has been another major source of pride for me. Contributing to a project that has real-world impact and supports public services is incredibly fulfilling.
TDT [11]: What do you aspire for in your future personally and for Drupal?
I think the honest answer to that question is that we don't know. If we had asked ourselves the same question 10 years ago, I don't think we could have imagined where we are today. We have to consider how devices might evolve. In 10 years, devices could look very different. We might see a shift from physical screens to projected interfaces—a concept that’s been visualised in fiction for a long time.
While I can’t say for certain if that will happen, it’s possible that instead of physical screens, we’ll be projecting interfaces onto walls. Rather than communicating in two dimensions, we may have the ability to do so in three dimensions. I believe the direction Drupal takes will be influenced by how devices evolve and how people consume information online.
One thing I’m certain of is that when those changes happen, Drupal will be at the forefront of innovation, ready to adapt and lead the way.
Alka Elizabeth My puns are intended.
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