By Allon Moritz on 2016-12-08 18:15 in New Media Manager Team

Information

With the “New Media Manager” sprint in Vienna on 27. November 2016, a new team was formed to overhaul the media manager functionality for Joomla. Over three days we were implementing a PoC for the categories/database approach and implemented the plugin system for image manipulation. The following chapters do give a brief overview about the sprint activity.

1. Day

We were discussing mainly the pros and cons of the database feature. We'v discovered a lot of challenges when we would implement stuff like ACL, translations, etc.

• No direct links to media files like images in content.
• {{media id=332}} tags instead of <img src""/>
• Increased complexity for the end user.
• Filesystem database synchronisation.
• Files must be hidden with a UID filename.

2. Day

Database schema has been defined. Similar list views as for articles have been implemented for media files. Categories have been introduced as well.

The plugin structure and interfaces have been defined for the action plugins like crop, resize or transform. First mock ups have been discussed for the edit image view.

3. Day

The upload field was ported to the list view of media files.

The action plugin structure has been set up. The edit view mock up is based on these real plugins.

The content plugin has been created which parses {{media id=343}} tags and transforms them into HTML img tags.

Resume

As we discovered all these challenges when we would go the database approach, we decided to mark the code as PoC and will reconsider the feature set for Joomla 3.8. More information about the roadmap will come soon.

All the code changes we did can be found in the vienna branch of our project repository. Please treat is as PoC.