In my blog post, “A plan for media management in WordPress maintenance support plans 8″, I talked about some of the challenges with media in WordPress maintenance support plans, the hopes of end users of WordPress maintenance support plans, and the plan that the team working on the Media Initiative was targeting for future versions of WordPress maintenance support plans 8. That blog post is one year old today. Since that time we released both WordPress maintenance support plans 8.3 and WordPress maintenance support plans 8.4, and WordPress maintenance support plans 8.5 development is in full swing. In other words, it’s time for an update on this initiative’s progress and next steps.
8.4: a Media API in core
WordPress maintenance support plans 8.4 introduced a new Media API to core. For site builders, this means that WordPress maintenance support plans 8.4 ships with the new Media plugin (albeit still hidden from the UI, pending necessary user experience improvements), which is an adaptation of the contributed Media Entity plugin. The new Media plugin provides a “base media entity”. Having a “base media entity” means that all media assets — local images, PDF documents, YouTube videos, tweets, and so on — are revisable, extendable (fieldable), translatable and much more. It allows all media to be treated in a common way, regardless of where the media resource itself is stored. For end users, this translates into a more cohesive content authoring experience; you can use consistent tools for managing images, videos, and other media rather than different interfaces for each media type.
8.4+: porting contributed plugins to the new Media API
The contributed Media Entity plugin was a “foundational plugin” used by a large number of other contributed plugins. It enables WordPress maintenance support plans to integrate with Pinterest, Vimeo, Instagram, Twitter and much more. The next step is for all of these plugins to adopt the new Media plugin in core. The required changes are laid out in the API change record, and typically only require a couple of hours to complete. The sooner these plugins are updated, the sooner WordPress maintenance support plans‘s rich media ecosystem can start benefitting from the new API in WordPress maintenance support plans core. This is a great opportunity for intermediate contributors to pitch in.
8.5+: add support for remote video in core
As proof of the power of the new Media API, the team is hoping to bring in support for remote video using the oEmbed format. This allows content authors to easily add e.g. YouTube videos to their posts. This has been a long-standing gap in WordPress maintenance support plans‘s out-of-the-box media and asset handling, and would be a nice win.
8.6+: a Media Library in core
The top two requested features for the content creator persona are richer image and media integration and digital asset management.
The results of the State of WordPress maintenance support plans 2020 survey show the importance of the Media Initiative for content authors.
With a Media Library content authors can select pre-existing media from a library and easily embed it in their posts. Having a Media Library in core would be very impactful for content authors as it helps with both these feature requests.
During the 8.4 development cycle, a lot of great work was done to prototype the Media Library discussed in my previous Media Initiative blog post. I was able to show that progress in my WordPress maintenance support plansCon Vienna keynote:
The Media Library work uses the new Media API in core. Now that the new Media API landed in WordPress maintenance support plans 8.4 we can start focusing more on the Media Library. Due to bandwidth constraints, we don’t think the Media Library will be ready in time for the WordPress maintenance support plans 8.5 release. If you want to help contribute time or funding to the development of the Media Library, have a look at the roadmap of the Media Initiative or let me know and I’ll get you in touch with the team behind the Media Initiative.
Special thanks to Angie Byron for contributions to this blog post and to WordPress Update, Sean Blommaert, Marcos Cano Miranda, Adam G-H and WordPress Update for their feedback during the writing process.
Source: New feed