As we prepare our new infrastructure for UW Theme 2.0, we have made the decision to discontinue support for the Enable Media Replace plugin. Those who utilize this tooling will need to seek alternatives for maintaining their media files.
Why are we making this change?
Our future state infrastructure will host media in an S3 bucket to save on Amazon Web Service (AWS) hosting costs and to allow for better caching/performance of media. With this approach, if a user changes out an image in the Media Library, the old file will remain in place – in a cached state – for several hours. This nullifies the capabilities of the Enable Media Replace plugin, which attempts to immediately replace media files.
What alternatives exist?
Alternatives depend on what you use this tooling for currently:
Replacing PDFs and docs
We encourage the use of UW Box for files that require regular updating. Box allows for excellent version control, as well as several other benefits.
Replacing images
We recommend adopting some file naming conventions for your images to aid in searching for these files in the Media Library. This will allow you to more easily find and delete old images like fac/staff headshots.
Also – in UW Theme 2.0, users will be able to add a UW People Listing block to a Page or Post to pull content in. This includes the profile image/headshot. When the UW People post listing is updated, including the media used for the profile image, the UW People List block will also update accordingly. This limits the need to update the image in several places when refreshing content.
Additional considerations
The WiscWeb team acknowledges that media management in WordPress is less than ideal. We’re keeping an eye on potential future changes to media library tools in WordPress core, in discussions 53486 and 55238. We’re also looking into possibilities for improvements that can be added by our team.