I am creating a website archive that will allow users to upload various different types of media content including video, audio, images, documents and text. I want to make it easy for users to upload the media content to the site.
Is it better to upload directly to the website hosting itself or to use a third party video and audio hosting like YouTube and SoundCloud?
Either way how can it be made as easy as possible for the user to upload the media content?
Get a media management suite that integrates with as many third party hosting providers as possible. It means less work for you, less complexity, and less bandwidth on your server for which you have to pay.
Good suite's include, but are not limited to:
Scald is a popular and flexible way to handle media in Drupal.
Scald can handle images, video, audio, tweets and even Flash files. Scald works with YouTube, Vimeo, Soundcloud and other many other providers.
and Media
The Media module provides an extensible framework for managing files and multimedia assets, regardless of whether they are hosted on your own site or a 3rd party site - it is commonly referred to as a 'file browser to the internet'.
For a front end media solution you can look at MediaFront
The MediaFront module is a front end media solution for Drupal. It employs an innovative and intuitive administration interface that allows the website administrator to completely customize the front end media experience for their users without writing any code.
You can try filedepot module
The filedepot module is full featured Document Management module that has a google docs like feel. It fulfills the need for an integrated file management module supporting role and user based security. Documents can be saved outside the Drupal public directory to protect documents for safe access and distribution.
Some more modules not mentioned yet in any of the previous answers ...
Here is a quote about the Take Control module (from its project page):
... is a set of set of modules for Drupal for managing various administrative tasks particularly related to the file system. Beginning with version 2.0, the module has been refactored into a core/add-on architecture, where a core module take_control provides common routines and settings, whereas the bulk of front-end user interaction comes from add-on modules (e.g. file browser etc).
Currently, there are 2 add-on modules:
File Browser: A complete File Browser/File Manager for Drupal. Allows you to manage your Drupal file-system directly through Drupal without needing FTP or your Hosting Control Panel access.
Quick Permissions: Many Drupal administrators are troubled by the: Drupal_Security_Do_Not_Remove_See_SA_2006_006 directive in Drupal file-system root's .htaccess file that effectively prevents write access to the file-system folder outside Drupal. This module allows you to take control of the file-system folder by specifying custom permissions on it from Drupal. Additionally, you can specify custom permission / delete any directory/file owned by Drupal using this module.
The Document module is a Document Management System for Drupal. Here is a quote about it (from its project page):
Features:
- Complete integration with Drupal node system. This module adds a custom Node Type, Document. Each Document you create is a Drupal node, and hence enjoys all features available to a node.
- Support for Document revisions/versioning - This module allows you to maintain multiple versions/revisions of the same document.
- Views 2 Integration - The custom fields added by the module to the Document node type are accessible in Views, plus the module provides some useful out-of-the box Views.
- Theming support
- Searching - The documents being nodes are fully indexable by the Drupal search system. In addition, the module provides its own custom search for Documents.
- A couple of blocks are available for document search that can be placed flexibly in your theme layout.
The elFinder module integrates with elFinder, which is a open source AJAX file manager. Here is a quote about it (from its project page):
Features:
- Integrated with WYSIWYG API capable editors: CKEditor, FCKeditor, TinyMCE, BUEditor (D6), jWYSIWYG (D6), YUI, WYMeditor.
- Multiple file upload.
- File copying/moving with Drag & Drop support.
- Quick file and directory rename.
- Image resizing.
- Lightbox-preview.
- Context menu with generic file/directory operations.
- Inline text file editing.
- Favourites directory list.
- Directory selection history.
- Working with archives.
- File descriptions.
The CMIS API module aims to provide a generic API for integrating with CMIS compliant Enterprise CMS (ECM) systems.
There are a few more modules that might look like a possible fit, though they are, in general, perceived as rather buggy / unstaled, or only support old (D6) Drupal releases so far. Below are some more details about those modules.
There is also the Media Browser Plus module, which is an enhancement module for the Media module, with additions such as:
Here is a quote about the Asset module (from its project page):
... proposes a new approach to the media management in Drupal, resolving a long-standing problem of reusable media files (images, videos, documents, etc) that evolved into the problem of reusable media content (images/videos/documents/etc with the attached content like description/licence/etc).
The Asset module provides new entity called Media Asset and the set of Media Assets examples (Image, Video, Audio, Document, Image Gallery, Free HTML), which can be enabled optionally.
The 'Web File Manager' module is for D6 only. And issue WebFM for Drupal 7 has status Closed (Won't fix). But there is also an ongoing discussion about a Ground-up rewrite of WebFM.
