Media Library in Drupal 8: integration with the CKEditor complete!

Drupal 8 makes it easier and easier to create rich, interesting, and beautiful content pages. Among the new features of the Drupal 8.7 release, we saw the stable Layout Builder and the new Media Library user interface. 

Another great piece of news is coming now! The Media Library in Drupal 8 has an embed button added to the CKEditor panel, and media embedding without a mouse is possible. This Media Library and CKEditor integration is now in the dev branch and will be officially available with the Drupal 8.8 stable release in December 2019. 

Consider scheduling your Drupal website update to 8.8 with our team. Meanwhile, let’s learn more about the new features.

The Media Library in Drupal 8 and rich content creation

Thanks to the Media Library and Media modules being part of the Drupal core, media handling in Drupal 8 is very convenient. It’s possible to add various types of media, store them in the Library, and reuse the content whenever you need it. 

You can display the items in a grid or table view, select and insert them, sort and filter them by various criteria, bulk upload, and so on. With the new Library user interface introduced in Drupal 8.7, everything looks and works especially well. Here are our screenshots from this version.

The default Drupal 8 media types are:

• Audio
• File
• Image
• Remote video (with links from YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)
• Video

Using items from Media Library in content

Content editors appreciate the ability to select items from the Library and insert it directly into the content. To achieve this, it is necessary to add the Media field of the relevant type to a content type (or other fieldable entities like user account). 

Great news: media button in the CKEditor panel

To make media selection and embedding experiences even smoother, the embed button has now been added to the CKEditor dashboard in Drupal 8.8x-dev release. This Media Library and WYSIWYG integration was announced in a tweet by “The Drop is Always moving.”

As we see, the Media Library button has an icon that looks attractive and clearly shows its purpose to users. 

The Media subsystem maintainer Phenaproxima shows nice screenshots and writes that the icon design is agreed by all, usability tests are successfully passed, and the button is well-tested. Congrats and thanks to the team of amazing experts for their job!

The work is successfully committed to the Drupal 8.8.x dev branch, waiting for the official release on December 4, 2019.

Users can click on the button, see the Media Library, select media, and click “ Insert Selected.”

The button can be enabled or disabled by drag-and-dropping, which is a great capability of the CKEditor in Drupal 8.

Breaking news: final patch for Media Library and WYSIWYG integration

As we were preparing this article for publication, another awesome news arrived about the final feature patch for the Media Library. It allows for media embedding in WYSIWYG with no mouse needed. Wim Leers, one of the gurus who make such things happen, posted a video on his blog post.

Enjoy the Media library’s new features!

Start producing richer content in a snap of a finger — use the Media Library in Drupal 8. Our Drupal support and development team can assist you in every step of your way. For example, we can:

• update you to Drupal 8.7 so you can use new Media Library’s user interface
• upgrade your website to Drupal 8 if you are still on Drupal 7
• adjust your website’s settings for easy media handling workflows
• advise you and set up other attractive ways to display content in Drupal 8
• and, of course, update you to the upcoming Drupal 8.8 as soon as it arrives in December

Follow our news about Drupal support services and always feel free to contact us!