Maintenance status for Video Embed Field now that media is in core

Created on 23 October 2019, about 5 years ago
Updated 7 March 2024, 9 months ago

The 8.x version of Video Embed Field has been marked as “Maintenance fixes only”. This decision has come largely due to the fact that core now fully supports remote embedded media. A message has been added to the project page that core already ships with a preferred solution for media management.

As a result of this, new features to this module won’t be committed. The maintenance will instead focus on ensuring existing users of the module have the least disruptive path to updating to a 9.x compatible version and of course adding and supporting tools for migrating to cores own media management.

There will be many sites that have the module deeply integrated into their architecture that may use custom plugins, the base field type or direct WYSIWYG integration. For that reason, it’s likely that the module will be still be supported for a long time into the future, but with "Minimally maintained" status.

While myself and others who are using the module appreciate new features, often the resources and expertise required to adequately test these features, (which may eventually be required to ship to 60k installations for Drupal 9 compatibility) are simply lacking, partly due to the fact that it’s a sunk cost for any new projects, that would prefer cores media management instead.

I would prefer any existing or new maintainers of the module refrain from committing new features or even bug fixes which may be considered disruptive to existing users. As the community looks forward towards Drupal 9, I believe the priority for existing installations of Drupal 8 should be the smoothest possible upgrade. Part of this upgrade means being on the latest version of contrib dependencies. For the vast majority of VEF users (many of which are more likely to be in a maintenance phase than a development one), new features and other significant changes are always going to come with a risk of disruption, often times a bug fixed on site A can mean a bug on site B. In my experience with maintaining the module, foreseeing these disruptions is often very difficult.

With all that in mind, hopefully any efforts put towards developing new features can be focused towards the supported media solution in Drupal core. Only issues which are geared towards helping users migrate to the media solution in core will be accepted.

🌱 Plan
Status

Active

Version

2.0

Component

Documentation

Created by

🇦🇺Australia Sam152

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  • 🇫🇮Finland sokru

    You can nowadays replace the "Video Embed Field" field with core's media and inline entity form without any custom code. Just needs some "advanced" site building by configuring the forms.

    The good migration guide with some examples would probably help projects with limited resources to move into core media, but I guess that should happen on 💬 Video Embed Field Migration Active or in documentation pages.

  • 🇫🇷France prudloff Lille

    Media is a great module, but I'm not sure I understand why every website that needs videos should use it. IMHO, it does not serve exactly the same use case as video embed fields (on simple image fields for that matter).
    On a small website where it does not make sense to reuse videos, using medias adds complexity and several more clicks to the editing experience.

    Yes, it is possible to replicate what video_embed_field does with inline_entity_form, but it adds a dependency on yet another module and makes the data structure more complex.

  • 🇧🇪Belgium fernly

    I had to install a Fresh Drupal instance to figure out what core is using to establish a video_embed_field alternative. Older Drupal installations don't automatically have this "Remote video" media.

    For anyone wondering how core works:

    Core is using a plain text field type combined with the oEmbed URL field widget and oEmbed content field formatter. Also, this only works on Media entities of source type "Remote video".

    So if you need to create a "core video embed field": create a new Media type with media source "Remote video" and add at least a plain text field for the video embed url with the mentioned field widget and formatter. Afterwards add a media reference field using "Remote video" media on the node type (or any other entity type) where the video_embed_field used to be.

    (if I missed this obvious information, that would be my bad)

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