Opinion: WordPress 2.9 media features

When I read the article about the upcoming WordPress 2.9 media features, I got excited that it’s now the next thing on the WordPress dev list. It’s one of those things that I feel strongly about when it comes to WordPress. The ability to easily extend WordPress is one of its strengths. It has also grown to being a robust framework/platform for online publishing. Actually it’s more than that, you’d be surprised at how people use it to create code stuff based on it. A pretty good example would be Alex Rabe’s NextGen Photo Gallery plugin.

Learning from the Master

When Matt started WordPress, I was using some other software for managing content. When I got to look at WordPress back then, I liked the idea of having filters and actions as a basic building block to create things. It provides an easy way to extend the features of a piece of software. As I’ve learned to use and develop things under WordPress, in my opinion, it’s actually what makes it strong — it’s very flexible and lean.

Let me give an example. While I was creating my own Web Directory WordPress plugin, it came to a point that I need to be able to update basic pieces of information like breadcrumb navigation (I really think this should be in the WordPress core). The thing that caught me is that the breadcrumb navigation plugin I was using didn’t allow for other plugins to update the “breadcrumb” or path.

One good thing about open-source, you can just dive in and modify it to your needs. The thing is, with the filters and actions framework in WordPress, it made it easier.

Back to Basic Publishing

If I am back in the stone age (ok, let’s just say several years ago), writing an article for a newspaper or magazine, what would be the things I’d need:

• Pen and paper
• Scissors and paste
• Filing system / archive of my sources
• Filing system / archive of my media

Filing system / archive of my media

When I started using WordPress for blogging, I found the media features a bit lacking of what I needed. Since then some of them has already made its way into the current WordPress version and I excited about how the upcoming version 2.9 will come out.

In the article at WordPress.org, I noticed one particular feature – media albums. This caught my attention because from my viewpoint, it’s a whole lot of features — in fact it’s everything.

You can’t have albums without a lot of things like import (or adding), deleting, editing media. The albums would also be of no use if it’s not going to be properly tagged or organized in some manner so the pre-requisite of having tagging is implied or else you’d have a whole bunch of files without any ability to search.

Maybe that’s why Alex’s NextGEN is very popular — it has a lot of the needed features.

With the normal development cycle of WordPress, it’s going to be a big task that will surely take several cycles to fully turn it into a great media library manager. If there’s a core bunch of features, I think that the following would suffice:

• Add, edit, delete media library entries (with bulk import/export to allow transfer across installations)
• Meta data (e.g. tags, categories, photo meta data …)
• Search media library (functions like search and use media)
• Store external media links as entries in the media library (the library shouldn’t be limited to just the local images/media, we should be able to manage externally linked media as well)

Involving the developer community

Just allow others to manipulate them and let the rest of the community come up with a whole generation of plugins that would enhance the above core features.

If for example a user just selected an image to include into his blog post, there should be a filter/action to allow a plugin to intervene and for instance crop the image before it’s actually “pasted” into the post — that will really be cool. I could see a whole lot of plugins getting done. For instance automatic inclusion of a watermark when the image gets “pasted”.

The possibilities are endless

With software the possibilities are endless especially when a software like WordPress has been created with a flexibility that allows others to build upon it. I can just imagine the discussion Jane Wells mentioned during the wordpress-dev that took a bit more time than expected.

By the way, I love the new widgets interace. Multiple instances and all.