WPwatercooler

EP401 – Reimagining The WordPress Media Library

WPwatercooler Show

October 8, 2021

This week on WPwatercooler we discuss the future of the Media Library with Helen Hou-Sandí and Joe McGill. “How do you fix the media library when people don’t understand filesystems?” We’ve talked about the Media Library in WordPress quite a bit and when we saw Helen’s tweet we just had to reach out. Joining us is Joe McGill who is one of the Media Library component maintainers. If you have been wanting more from the Media Library we hope this conversation helps with that.

I think it would be really good for WordPress developers to really read and absorb this piece and think about how things are currently approached in the UI and explaining what WordPress is and how we can actually be effective in a mental model of apps and no file system. https://t.co/HNbeNuuNeN pic.twitter.com/DQj5NucxZr
— Helen 侯-Sandí (@helenhousandi) September 23, 2021

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Jason Tucker – jasontucker.blog
Steve Zehngut – zeek.com
Sé Reed – sereedmedia.com
Jason Cosper – jasoncosper.com
Helen Hou-Sandí – helen.blog
Joe McGill – joemcgill.net

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2 responses to “EP401 – Reimagining The WordPress Media Library”

Jason Adams

October 8, 2021

I think Steve hit the nail on the head. There are lofty features such as AI search that we can easily agree is not achievable in a distributable way. What is achievable, however, is working away from the one-size-fits-all data model of WordPress — in this case, that media is just another post type. It has bizarre results (i.e. an attachment page that I’ve literally never heard of being used) and unfortunate limitations (poorly searchable and held back by postmeta scaling).

Taking steps towards discreet media tables would be a solid step forward towards at least making media first-class citizen of WP that is inherently performant and ready to be independently extended by plugins.

As a bonus, taking the opportunity to begin to regard database tables and models as first class citizens could really help make this a reality: query builder, database migrations, and so forth.

Just some friendly musing. 🙂

Jason Tucker

October 12, 2021

Thanks for you comment we really appreciate it. It was eye opening to see the plugins and tools presented on this episode and the way in which things could and can be now if using large compute APIs to make happen. Really cool stuff, we’re looking to talk more about this. The media library has a long way to go and were really looking for some answers.

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EP401 – Reimagining The WordPress Media Library

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2 responses to “EP401 – Reimagining The WordPress Media Library”

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