Multisite Global Media Settings

[ina2n]

In the WP Multisite Network Admin, we have the following menu options to control the network:

Dashboard
Sites
Users
Themes
Plugins
Settings

My suggestion is to add to this list, a "Media" menu that creates global images for all sites. Anything loaded into this global Media menu is instantly available to all sub-sites.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Looks like there are some plugins for that:
​https://wordpress.org/plugins/network-shared-media/
​https://github.com/bueltge/Multisite-Global-Media

[ina2n]

Yes. I understand there are plugins for this feature. Just like domain mapping was a plugin for multisite for years. It's time that multisite get this feature added to it's core.

I think maybe there's a disconnect between what many of you at WP do as coders, and those of us coding for our customers. It's understandable that there are plugin options, but there are key functions that WP multisite needs to make it the best solution out of the box. This is one of those solutions.

Speaking for myself, I build websites within the same industry. This allows me to duplicate an entire sub-domain over to a new customer site, and I have them up and running with a brand new website before we hang up the phone.

That's the true power of multisite. Just like WP did for bloggers, WP Multisite is now the industry standard for all industries. Multisite is at the bleeding edge of this new online standard. You can't even find this capability in any other website framework.

From my perspective, and a few others, global media should be a core standard. Look closely at 'how' WP Multisite is being used by your web/sys admins, and you'll see this is one of those must haves.

Thank you.

[johnbillion]

I'm the maintainer of ​the Network Media Library plugin for WordPress which was originally based on the Multisite Global Media plugin linked above, and I have to say that I don't think a network-wide media library is a feature that belongs in WordPress core due to the underlying complexity of its implementation.

There are too many varying requirements that I don't think would make sense to try to support in core and are best left to plugins and individual implementations:

• Restricting media to certain groups of sub-sites, which effectively becomes multiple instances of the network-wide media library
• REST API access, permalinks, URLs, etc (eg. should a network-wide media item be available at the domain+path of the site it's used on or be served from the central media site's domain+path?)
• Allowing or denying the use of network-wide media on a per-site basis
• Allowing or denying the use of local media in addition to the network-wide media, again on a per-site basis
• A means of importing existing media on sites into the network-wide media library (or libraries), or somehow co-locating existing local media with network-wide media
• Access control management to upload network-wide media and access media in the network media library

I'll close this as wontfix due to lack of interest in three years, and recommend that anyone looking for this functionality looks at using one of the several plugins that attempt to provide this functionality.