Media Manager Plugin

[aliozinan]

• Reference Issues/Discussions: N/A
• Author: Ali Ozinan
• Champion(s): Ali Ozinan
• Implementation PR:
• Repo link:

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• [✓] I agree

Summary

Currently, the admin users have to enter the image urls manually into the relevant text boxes on the dashboard. An UI based interface that's capable to connect to various storage providers would make it easier to upload the media assets and retrieve their URLs.

Background & Motivation

This proposal is inspired by the Astro Cloudinary upload widget. The idea is providing a similar interface on the StudioCMS dashboard for the image url textboxes (and other places where media assets are involved). To keep things flexible, the plan is to introduce a new type of plugin which won't get involved with adding any custom routes and/or pages. For more details, please see the Goals section.

Goals

• Introducing a new plugin type structure to StudioCMS codebase, named as "media manager plugin" : This would solely aim to provide the framework to build media manager plugins, making things flexible enough for the community. As an example; a media manager plugin could add an icon button next to the url textboxes on the dashboard, which would trigger the popup to display the media manager interface. On the interface, the user would be able to upload media assets to the connected storage providers, and pick one of them to update the image url textbox value.
• Providing a working prototype, which would use a single storage provider.
• Documenting the new plugin type structure and guides for adding new storage providers with code examples

Non-Goals

• Non-goal: N/A
• Out-of-scope: N/A
• Future: Adding the icon buttons to the content managers on the dashboard.

[louisescher]

First of all, a great proposal. This is something we've talked about internally a few times now, with ideas being proposed multiple times for how to handle this. I have a few nitpicks though:

• Why does the media manager need to add it's own button? I think it is fair to assume that at most one media host will be used, and I cannot imagine that a lot of people want to use multiple. Even then, would it not make more sense to replace the entire input with a file selector? Maybe this is something we can build into StudioCMS UI?
• Related to the first question, is there any reason for this being a popup, or do you think it could work inline as well? If not, why a popup?

[aliozinan]

Hi @louisescher , thank you for your feedback and input.

Before I created this proposal, I consulted @Adammatthiesen. Initially I was also thinking of replacing the textboxes, but Adam told me that the goal should be keeping things flexible for the users as much as possible, so the text boxes should remain. Which makes sense for a scenario like, when the user picks an image on the popup, the popup disappears and the image url becomes the input value. At this point, if the user would want to change the url to a custom one (which is an image from another source, that they won't be able to pick from the storeage provider(s) using the popup interface), the text box remaining there would be handy to let them paste the new url into it.

The reason to use a popup interface is all about getting the inspiration from the widget that I mentioned. Yet still, the first goal is providing a flexible framework to allow building a media manager plugin, and the inline version could be an option in the framework to allow having that. I'll need a lot of feedback for the framework itself to allow customization as much as possible, yours being the first one, and thank you for that once again :)

[louisescher]

I do agree that keeping things flexible should be our Number 1 priority. However, we need to consider the UX as well. Sure, uploading images from the UI itself is great. But then showing the link will be unnecessary to 80% of Users. Maybe the image name could be shown? A preview of the image? Once I have an image uploaded, why do I need to see the link? I'm most likely never going to touch it again, and if I do, what would I need the URL for? I do agree that it should stay there if you don't have a media driver installed, but seeing the URL won't matter to a majority of users.
The same goes for custom URLs / external images. I imagine that, should you use an external image, once pasted (either from the clipboard or by URL), you don't need to see the URL again. You want to see the image and probably it's name!

[aliozinan]

Honestly I'm thinking of leaving such UX related decisions to the internal team, that's why I went for following Adam's suggestion instead of my own idea at the beginning. At this point I'm aiming to get an approval for this proposal, and then build the framework to create the first prototype, so that we could have a visual example to go on discussing. I'm sure you guys will come up with your conclusions since this is a plugin that would make some changes on the dashboard UI and the UX, and I'd be happy to follow them.

[louisescher]

That's totally fine! I'm just playing Devil's Advocate here to see how thought out this proposal is. But from my part, this is a proposal I would accept and like to see move forward!