The Drupal core Media Library module provides an enhanced user interface for locating Media entities and attaching them to an article. It's a drop-in replacement for the default entity reference widget which uses a not very intuitive autocomplete field. Using the Drupal core Media Library module requires minimal configuration.

If you want to provide content creators with a gallery-like library of Media entities that they can browse through in order to find the ones they want to add to their content, the Media Library is the easiest way to do it. It can be configured to work with both Media fields and the CKEditor powered WYSIWYG editor commonly used for editing the body field of Drupal nodes. There's really no reason not to use it.

In addition to providing a better UI for locating existing Media entities, the Media Library provides a way to create new Media entities right from the content creation form. This prevents an otherwise confusing requirement where Media entities need to be created, via a different set of forms, before they can be used.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Install and configure the Media Library module to work with Media fields
• Use the user interface provided by the Media Library to improve the experience of finding and selecting Media entities to associate with a piece of content

By the end of this tutorial you'll know how to replace the default entity reference widget used for selecting Media entities with the much improved Media Library UI.

Media entities, like any content entity, work great with all the different features Drupal provides for changing the way things are displayed: view modes, Layout Builder, theme templates, and more. We're big fans of using view modes to create a component-like design system where entity types have view modes representing the different context in which they're displayed. Then we theme the view modes. This works great for displaying Media entities associated with a page and for changing the way that Media assets are displayed within the Media Library browser.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Create Hero and Sidebar view modes for Media entities
• Configure the Image Media type to use the new view modes and style each one differently
• Use the new view modes to render Image Media assets within a Layout
• Update the Media library view mode that's used by the Media Library browser to display additional information alongside the thumbnails used when selecting Media to attach to a page

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to change the way that Media assets are displayed by using view modes and display formatters in a Drupal site.

The Render API consists of two parts: structured arrays that provide data and hints about how that data should be rendered, and a rendering pipeline that can be used to render these arrays into various output formats. Understanding at least the basics of how the Render API works, the difference between elements and properties, and the concept of callback functions is an integral part of learning Drupal.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Look at the fundamentals of the Drupal Render API
• Point to additional material to provide more detail about the inner workings of the Render API and how content is output in Drupal

The core structure of Drupal's Render API is the render array, which is a hierarchical associative array containing data to be rendered and properties describing how the data should be rendered. As a module developer you'll use render arrays to describe the content your module controls in order to output it on a page as HTML, or as part of a response in another format like JSON. As a theme developer, you'll manipulate render arrays in order to affect the way content is output on the page.

In this tutorial we'll learn:

• What render arrays are and why they exist
• The basic format of a render array
• What "properties" and "elements" signify in the context of a render array
• Where to find more information about how to create a render array to describe your own content

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to understand when you need to use a render array, recognize one when you see it, and know where to get more detailed information about render array formatting specifics.