thron
The THRON - Drupal Connector allows editors to exploit assets coming from THRON on their Drupal instance, selecting multimedia files directly from the CMS's media library, relieving the website from the management of the distribution of multimedia files and fully exploiting all the features and potential of THRON's Elastic Media Delivery.
The integration between THRON and Drupal brings the following benefits:
- The connector allows to minimize the costs of integration with THRON: just install it and configure the connection details, and the contents of THRON will be immediately available within the Drupal media library.
- No more duplicated media files between THRON and Drupal: THRON is the "unique source of truth" for all the multimedia elements.
- Improve page loading performance and peak management: the distribution of multimedia files is entirely managed by the THRON Elastic Media Delivery features and through the Universal Player.
- Automatically collect Content Intelligence data: the Connector keeps track of any type of interaction between users and media files and profiles the interests of the audience.
How does it work?
Inside the WYSIWYG editor present in the Drupal content creation tool, there will be a special button that will show the contents of THRON. In addition to searching, this content can be filtered by:
- Type
- Tag
Once the content to be included in the page has been selected, the editor can decide the type of embed:
- THRON Universal Player, and possibly the template to use
- HTML tag
and the resize logics:
- Fixed size embed
- Responsive Embed
The contents inserted in the page by the Connector will be automatically enriched with all the information useful for their indexing by search engines; THRON's Elastic Media Delivery will dynamically adapt their quality according to the device in use and the bandwidth available, and all interactions between users and this content will be automatically tracked.
Requirements
The THRON connector can be installed on Drupal version 8.4.0 or later, on an already configured site.
The THRON connector module is compatible with Drupal 9 and 10 (in the version 2.x).
Installation and configuration
Install as you would normally install a contributed Drupal module. The recommended method for adding a dependency to your project is using Composer: this process will download and install the contributed module, along with its dependencies. Enter the following command at the root of your site:
composer require drupal/thron
Once the command is complete you should see a message indicating the module has been added to your projects composer.json file as a dependency and the related code has been downloaded.
After the download you will need to enable the module in the "Extend" section of Drupal which is located at the /admin/modules path of the site.
Visit https://www.drupal.org/docs/8/extending-drupal-8/installing-drupal-8-mod... for further information.
Manual installation
You must first install the modules the Drupal connector depends on:
- The entity_browser module (version 2.1 or later). This can be installed via composer (
composer require drupal/entity_browser) or by downloading tar.gz archives of the module and its dependencies - The entity_embed module (version 1.0-rc2 or later). This can be installed via composer (
composer require drupal/entity_embed) or by downloading tar.gz archives of the module and its dependencies - The media_entity_browser module (version 2.0 or later). This can be installed via composer (
composer require "drupal/media_entity_browser:^2.0") or by downloading tar.gz archives of the module and its dependencies
You can now extract the "THRON module" zip archive in the path web/modules/custom in order to have the following set: web/modules/custom/thron.
Lastly, enable the module in the "Extend" section of Drupal which is located at the /admin/modules path of the site.
Configuring Credentials and Integration details
You must enable a THRON - Drupal connector application on your service code to activate the integration; contact the THRON Support Team for more details.
Once the application is enabled, the Management panel in your THRON instance will report the integration's credentials: go to the /admin/config/services/thron path in the Drupal settings for entering the credentials and configuring the integration details.
Fill the panel with the THRON credentials (client ID, app ID, app key) you have been provided and then click on the "Save configuration" button to start the integration process.
Once you have saved the credentials, you will be asked to provide a series of further customizations: the most important are related to he intelligence classifications that will be used to restrict the search on tags to; the connector will search only on the tags on the enabled classifications (for instance, "Topic" and "Target").
Configuring text format
In the following configuration step you will enable the THRON content embedding tool by adding the relevant button in the CK Editor toolbar. You can choose the text format you want to enable this button on (Basic HTML, Full HTML, or any other text format defined in the Drupal site configuration); for example, if you want to add the THRON plugin to the "Full HTML" text format you will have to go to /admin/config/content/formats/manage/full_html in your Drupal site. The URL format for this configuration page is in the form /admin/config/content/formats/manage/{text format}.
Drag the "THRON" button from the "Available buttons" to one suitable position in the "Active toolbar".
Make sure that the "Display embedded entities" checkbox is flagged and then save the text format.
You will now be able to embed THRON content via the button in the CKEditor window in the desired text format.
For more detail please check the Drupal Connector's page in the THRON Marketplace.