The Kentico 4.1 update promised two major improvements. First, the introduction of the smart search that gives users better and faster search results, and second, better media handling to facilitate the work of content editors.
At a first glance I was sure that the number one improvement in version 4.1 was the new search engine, but after discovering the changes in media handling, I am not so sure any more.... but let's start with the latter anyway.
New Insert/Edit media interface
This thing pops up right in your face! If you try to insert an image or a link, you will be confronted with a new, more powerful dialog box, which allows — depending on the context — you to select either an attachment (new concept), a file from the media library, a document, a hyperlink or an e-mail address. So everything is in one place and within a consistent interface.
1. The new interface organizes all media in one place (attachments, content, media libraries and media from the web). 2. They can now be organized like on your desktop as list, tiles or thumbnail. 3. Together these make the selection of the right media a lot easier.
Better integration of media library files
Media library files are now fully supported on the document type level, meaning that now you can do everything with files stored in the media library that you did before with the "File" document type. Actually, even a little bit more. I discussed the advantages of the media library in a recent post. So for creating custom document types, there are now a variety of media selectors available.
More important to end-users is the fact that the built-in image editor now works with the media library as well.
And in the developer guide you will find a good example of how to give editors the power of integrating Flash Video (FLV) files with only a few clicks. The example works with my favourite media player, the JW FLV Player. For commercial projects you will need to purchase their license, but with all the available plug-in and features, it is worth the investment.
I enabled this option for my clients and here is a small example of a Flash movie that was easily added with the “insert media button” of the text editor:
This 100 second tutorial movie was created in cooperation with o-media. I am currently working on a solution that automatically displays the preview file of a Flash video, but that is not trivial...
The YouTube button
Now what if you are not able to convert your videos into the Flash format? Right, you upload it to YouTube. Social media services are getting indispensible and logically their integration should be part of a CMS. Done! With the "Insert YouTube" dialogue box, editors can easily spice up their contributions with movies that have been uploaded to YouTube:
Here is the same movie in YouTube format.
The old-fashioned file document type
Most often, you won't. More often than not you will choose the new document attachments.
Instead of creating a new document and attaching an image to it, and then finally inserting it into a page, you now simply attach it to your document; be it a regular page, a press release or an event.
These attachments are then available for insertion into text fields, but — and this is the big advantage — they are bound to the life cycle of the document. You publish your document; your attachments are automatically published as well. You delete the document; your attachments are deleted.
There are also several options to automatically display images or documents on the page via webparts. This can make your clients' life a lot easier if for example, each of your press releases is also published in PDF format.
Attachments can be added directly to a document and are share the life cycle of the document.
Image scaling
Not all clients or content managers are adept at preparing images, making it a longstanding issue in site maintenance. We’ve all experienced pages that take an eternity to load and eventually discover the problem stems from the client who unnecessarily uploaded a huge file. This version of Kentico helps eliminate this situation, allowing you to define a maximum width for images. So even if the images come straight out of a 10 mega pixel camera, they won't be bigger than the size you’ve programmed. In certain cases, you can also decide to scale them to a fixed width and height.
Better still, if you attach images to a document (this does not work with media library files), you can manually scale your images proportionally. Thus, the uploaded file remains on the server and a scaled version is generated upon the first request. This means faster downloads for subsequent requests.
So your big image once scaled down, is delivered as small which save bandwidth. The fun part is that the large image remains available should you want to use it full-size later and without quality loss. That is a big deal in making image handling accessible to a wide range of users!
Simply drag your image into the image editor to physically scale your image without losing the original!.
Conclusion
Version 4.1 will completely change the handling of media. The media library is fully-integrated and even more important, for editors — people who should to use the CMS the most — it is now a lot easier to insert images, attachments and videos. A big step in the right direction and a step that has me eagerly anticipating arrival of “widgets” as announced for the 5.0 version. This will give editors the power to insert webparts into a text area.