Not so long ago, the use of video on the web raised questions like: Will users be able to view the movie and how long will it take to download? These questions are a thing of the past. Yes, hello YouTube. High speed Internet has become the standard in urban areas and in the shadow of the video boom, everything from audio files (the podcast epidemic caused by iPods and iPhones) to complete electronic PDF versions of product catalogs silently found their place on the Internet. Keeping up with demands resulting from this change, Kentico has introduced media libraries in its latest release. Performance enhancements for speed, SEO and file transfer – all three in one change.
Expect a performance boost
One of the biggest enhancements of these media libraries, will be the performance boost gained from the way we use images for web pages. The graphical elements of a page – all the skin’s design elements – being images, means that this change touches a lot of files.
Previous versions of Kentico handled images exactly like any other file or page in the system. All information about the image was stored in the database. Advantages: versioning and workflow features also applied to image files. Disadvantage: performance and somewhat limited SEO for these files.
With media libraries, images go where they belong: exclusively into the file system of the server. Now images — if stored in the media library — will no longer need to be processed by the CMS/database, which will speed up the display of your web pages.
Expect an SEO boost
Without media libraries, files were referenced with a GUID (Globally Unique Identifier). Advantage: You can rename or move a file without changing the references to it. Disadvantage: Inferior SEO because search engines cannot make sense out of the file name. Also, depending on the browser, saving a PDF file to your desktop resulted in illegible and irrelevant file names.
With media libraries you can use relevant file names and incorporate search engine optimization on these files.
Three ways to manage files
Have you ever tried to upload a 100 MB file to a server via a browser? I’ll bet there’s a good chance that it didn't work and eventually someone told you to use an ftp program. Well, that is the difference between http (hyper text transfer protocol) and ftp (file transfer protocol), each was designed to do one thing VERY well.
Bulk upoad with an FTP software, simply register them with the CMS and you are done.
The good news is that now Kentico gives you the opportunity to upload your files via FTP; software that was built specifically for the job. Once this is done, you register the files within the cms and you are done. That's smart the way to go especially for heavy audio and video files or a batch of files.
Alternatively, you can still upload your files via the cms desk, which is convenient in certain situations.
Additionally, as in the case of Kentico’s a social network elements, you can configure your site to enable users to upload files directly on-site, similar to the on-site blog editing feature.
Three choices that offer flexibility and greatly improved file transfer and management possibilities.
The extras
Not to be forgotten is the way you can integrate media files into your web pages. With the media library file type you can for example, insert a wmv video file on your page and it will automatically insert all the code necessary to display the windows media player in the browser.
With some tweaking the same can be done with Flash movies — the most common video format on the web.
And last, but not least, is the ability to secure files. This is done with the Integrated Windows Security feature. It comes at the cost of some performance, but this is really just if you want to be sure that only certain users can download your files.