By Allon Moritz on 2016-12-27 07:40 in New Media Manager Team

As with the sprint in Vienna, a small group of Joomlers rebooted the "New Media Manager" project. During this three days we discovered some challenges when implementing certain features which will have big impact on the user workflow. Additionally we checked the UX survey from 2015, to get a rough idea what people need/expect from the media manager most. The outcome was, that we want to provide a feature roadmap where we can cover most of the needs on short term and to outline the path where we are heading to.

We organised the features into Joomla minor and major releases to provide a rough strategy for the future. Please don't take that feature set as fixed, as it is very likely that new ones will be added or existing ones skipped/postponed. The following chapter describes our team roadmap without any technical details.

 

 

Joomla 3.8 (milestone 1)

If there wil be a Joomla 3.8 release then the following features are planed for the Joomla 3 series. Otherwise the milestone 1 will be moved to Joomla 4.

Drag and drop

Upload multiple media files through file upload, drag and drop or copy paste from clipboard into the actual folder. The progress should be visualized as well.

Improve UI

The user interface should become more modern.

• It will be possible in the tree view to drag and drop folders and files between folders.
• Show file meta information of the media in the preview.
• Rename file.
• Save last position in the folder tree.
  
  

Image editing

Opening an image should allow the following editing features:

• Crop
• Resize
• Rotate

The different actions will be implemented through Joomla plugins to be easy extendable.

SVG support (optional)

Allow to upload and view SVG files. As we need to consider all the security implications, this feature has an optional status.

 

 

Joomla 4.0 (milestone 2)

As the release date for Joomla 4 is not set yet, it is impossible to predict a feature set for Joomla 4.0. We will define the plan for milestone 2 after milestone 1 has finished.

Move images folder to media

Moving the images folder to the media folder.

 

 

Joomla 4.x

The following features are not yet assigned to a Joomla 4 minor release.

Cloud filesystems

It will be possible to integrate cloud filesystems like Dropbox, AWS or WebDAV as sources for media files. preferable trough plugins.

Home folder

A configuration setting which allows users from certain groups to only access their private home folder. Perhaps only in the media form field as a new setting.

Media integration

Media form fields should allow to not only pick images, also more media files like PDF or SVG documents.

Batch processing

Select images and execute some batch actions like resize or rename.

 

 

Joomla 4.x

This features will have a big impact on the existing workflow of the media manager for the end user. It needs some deeper research and consolidation with the community.

Database abstraction

The media files will be abstracted as database entries and the folder structure is visualized through categories. It’s a virtual layer above the (cloud)file system.

ACL

ACL should be implemented so admins can define who can manipulate and view the media files.

File statistics

Determine the usage of media files within Joomla.

Language associations

It is now possible to associate articles, the same should be possible with media files and their categories.

Search

Searching for media files in the default Joomla search and smart search.

Tagging

Tagging files with Joomla’s tagging extension.

 

 

Organisation 

We plan to keep our wiki accurate as source for the roadmap. In the next couple of days, we want organise the issue tracker, where we define more fine grained tasks for milestone one which is the feature set for Joomla 3.8. The team which is implementing milestone 1 is communicating in a private glip channel, altough the new media manager glip channel is open for the public. There we will publish regularly updates about the status of milestone 1. All the code activities can be found in our projects repository.