Add option to store files in /uploads in the cloud

Hi,

Thanks for adding your feature request here.

I build communities with BuddyBoss (based on a fork of BuddyPress). In a large and active community, there can be a lot of files uploaded by the members which are stored in the /uploads folder. Keeping a site from using up server storage can require strong restrictions on user uploads of files. The obvious answer to this problem is offloading /uploads to the cloud.

Your cloud add-on for WP Media Folder is great for storing the Media Folder to an Amazon S3 bucket (or other cloud storage). Given the large number of online communities being build with WordPress, lack of support for /uploads in your plugin is an area where you could further distinguish your product from its competitors. I know I've seen other BuddyBoss users asking about how they can do this very thing, and the answer is: there are no options.

Please give serious consideration to adding this capability as an option in your cloud storage add-on. I'd gladly pay extra for this feature.

It would be useful in a few cases as you described. We’ll keep that in mind for a future release!

Thanks a lot!
Cheers,

++1

vingogly speaks the truth! There are currently no solutions for offloading media on BuddyPress/BuddyBoss based sites, which actually have the strongest case for using media offloading as social networking sites with a high volume of user file uploading. And nobody is meeting this demand - wowowoweee...

As indigetal suggests, this is a feature that's useful in more than a "few cases". BuddyPress shows 200,000+ installations on wordpress.org; and my best guess is that there are several thousand additional sites that use BuddyBoss Platform.

We actively build sites for our clients on the BuddyBoss Platform, and so far, no S3 offload plugin will offload the uploads from the BuddyBoss community to S3.

Your competitor is currently working on an integration that will do this, although it's not documented on their site yet:
https://deliciousbrains.com/wp-offload-media/upgrade/

Here's an example of how community users can upload media to the site:
https://www.buddyboss.com/resources/docs/components/media/photo-uploading/

You can create a sandbox to play around with the BuddyBoss Platform here: https://demos.buddyboss.com/online-communities/

The problem is that these uploads are stored in a special folder that is not inside the regular WP Media Library. I think they still store them in a sub-folder under "uploads," but they may have moved them recently.

What I would like to see is the ability to select file locations other than the Media Library to have offloaded to S3. This would be more flexible than simply supporting BuddyBoss media because other plugins sometimes create a sub-directory under "uploads" as well. If your plugin could scan a list of folders under the uploads directory and allow us to choose which ones to offload, that might solve the issue.

If you don't add this feature, you will lose my business along with 1000s of other potential BuddyBoss users because the WP Offload Media from Delicious Brains will have the capability soon. I like your plugin better because it gives me so many more features (Media Library folders + Update, Replace, Duplicate Existing Media + S3 offload, etc) all in one plugin. If I have to go with the Delicious Brains plugin then I'll have to install Enable Media Replace and another folder organization plugin to get what I need.

Please feel free to reach out to me if you'd like more details on what we need and why this is so important.

Cheers!
Ellen

Hi Ellen,
I have not fully tested this yet but I asked customer support and they said offloading does work with synced server folders. So you can sync the wp-content/uploads/buddypress, wp-content/uploads/bb_documents, wp-content/uploads/bb_videos, and wp-content/uploads/bb_medias folders with the media library folder and then setup Amazon S3 integration with these instructions - making sure to select "Remove after Amazon S3 upload" to enable media offloading. Let customer support know if the synced server folders are not offloading because as far as they know, it should offload synced server folders too.

Cheers,
Brandon

I'm the original poster. Take a look at the documentation files here:

https://www.joomunited.com/support/wordpress-plugins-documentation?extension=wp-media-folder

How do I know which knowledgebase file to open based on the descriptions? Your software is great, but the documentation needs to be organized by someone who understands information architecture. Too many companies today see documentation as an afterthought rather than as an integral part of their offerings. The more complex the software, the greater the need for documentation that's usable.

The quality and timeliness of the support I've gotten on my question leaves a lot to be desired. In this case, I opened this ticket nine months ago -- that's a hell of a long time to get resolution to a usability issue. And the response I initially got didn't understand that a new feature wasn't needed (assuming of course the solution they gave you does work - I haven't tried it yet), then minimized its importance by saying it "would be useful in a few cases". If Ellen hadn't posted her response, I would not have gotten a satisfactory answer to my question -- support's last response before Ellen posted a day ago was *last fall*.

We pay JoomUnited for the quality of support and the usability of its products, not just for code that's been developed by the company. Crappy support *loses customers* to the competition.