[spp-player url="https://episodes.castos.com/wpbuilds/wpbuilds-episode-139.mp3"]
In this episode:
Discussion - A better way to manage your media library with Stuart Brameld
Firstly, I have to apologise for the terrible audio quality. Our guest, Stuart, sounds just fine, but something clearly went wrong on my side of the recording. I can only imagine that I inadvertently used my Mac's internal mic somehow. It's certainly bearable, but I'm sorry for messing it up for Stuart more than anything!
With that said, let's get down to what we've got for you today shall we?
Let's be honest about it, the WordPress Media Library looks great, but it's not all that useful out of the box! Sure, it will show you nice little thumbnails of the images that you've uploaded, it can even be toggled to show you a list with some attached meta data, but that's about where it ends. It's pretty simple, and you know what, I think that it should stay this way because it's more than usable and we've got to remember that WordPress is catering for a gigantic number of people and so simplicity is the name of the game.
As with all things there are people who need more than WordPress core provides. People like Stuart Brameld. You see they look at the Media Library and they think to themselves that they want it to do more, to do additional things and to look different from the way it does now.
So... meet
WP Media Manager! It takes a different approach from the Core WordPress offering. For a start none of your media assets are stored in your WordPress install. They are instead stored in dedicated off-site cloud storage solutions. At present the plugin works with Amazon S3 and Microsoft Azure.
One of the benefits of putting your assets onto these platforms is that you get a highly scalable, always available, cheap option which does not rely on your cheap hosting serving up your files for you, which can be a huge bottleneck to your site performance.
One of the big selling points of the WP Media Manage is the way that it looks. It allows you to have a very tasteful UI which reminds me quite a lot of SaaS options such as Dropbox and Google Drive. You really should take a look at the way that it looks. WordPress' media is all stored with a flat UI, there's no easy way to find things and apply order to the media that you've stored in there. I like the options in Windows Explorer, the Mac Finder, Google Drive and Dropbox to create folders and sub folders. I use this all the time and WP Media Manager allows you to do this too.
Scale is also a thing that might make you want to look at this further. Azure and S3 are literally limitless (and cheap); you can store everything that you've ever created digitally and they will serve them up for you from multiple data centres, not from the one tiny hosting machine that you site might be sitting on!
Another great feature of WP Media Manager is the security that it affords. Stuart has a background in ITSec and they've worked hard to make sure that the data that flows through their plugin is stored using the security features that S3 and Azure provide. This means that you can have 'access signatures' which create private areas when you can store sensitive documents in a private manner. Although these documents are online, they are not available unless you use the correct API tokens. This means that you can do things like restrict access to your media to a specific IP address, for a certain length of time and many other possibilities. I personally think that this is a great feature and one that might well have you looking carefully at other rival plugins to see if they're still needed - I'm thinking membership plugins which restrict access to assets such as .pdf's and video files.
Stuart makes the point that the plugin is easy to set up. You create your Amazon bucket or Azure blob and paste the keys that are associated with them into the plugin. From that point on you don't need to interact with Amazon or Azure again - you're going to be working from with WordPress from now on.
All the standard things that you have always wanted to do easily can now be done - moving files, renaming files, deleting files. Point - click - type - enter!
Why not have a look to see if WP Media Manager can improve the way that you work with your WordPress website.
Mentioned in this episode:
WP Media Manager
