Compass Designs .net

Part of a series of articles highlighting new features in Joomla 1.6.

The Media Manager is a longstanding feature in Joomla. It came over from the Mambo days. Between Joomla 1.0 and 1.5, not many changes were made to the Media Manager. Along the way, the Media Manager even lost functionality, when it lost the ability to upload multiple images at once.

Fortunately, the Media Manager has been granted a bit of love in Joomla 1.6. Let's take a look at some of the new features you can expect to find.

First, the location for the menu item for the Media Manager has changed, from the Site menu to the Content menu. Go to Content - Media Manager in the back end of Joomla, and you should see a screen like this:

The very first thing you might notice -- the stories folder is gone! You may now upload your images directly to the images directory.

Of course, if you're attached to the old stories folder, or if you're moving a site over from Joomla 1.5, you could always create a stories folder. At the bottom of the Media Manager window, just above the upload area, note the path on the screen (/home/fourweb/public_html/j16/images). Next to that is a box, where you can type in the folder name you wish to create. Then click the "Create Folder" button, which is underneath all of that.

(My screenshots are taking at 1024x768 resolution. In all likelihood, some things are wrapping on these images that you may not see if you're using a higher resolution for working on your Joomla site. This may be why the "Create Folder" button is located underneath the interface for creating the folder.)

Also, note that the old sample images are gone. What you now get are images associated with the sample data (in the sampledata folder), images associated with the banner component (banners), and some Joomla logos associated with the new templates that come with Joomla.

Next, let's start in the upper right corner. Click the Options icon, and you'll see a shadowbox appear. This has many of the configuration options once available in the Global Configuration in Joomla 1.5. Now, those options have been moved here, where they are attached to their functionality.

• Legal extensions are the types of files that may be uploaded to the Media Manager, including images and files like PDFs, Office documents, etc.
• Maximum size is the maximum size of the file that may be uploaded. In this case, it's 10 MB. Remember that this is a Joomla restriction on file size. PHP may also restrict file upload size, so be sure to check PHP's settings if you are having trouble uploading large files.
• Path to file folder and path to image folder are the default paths for uploading files (like PDFs, Office documents, etc) and images within the Media Manager. Note the stories folder is gone! You can upload to the images folder directly.
• Legal image extensions (file types) means what kinds of files uploaded should be considered images (GIF, JPG, PNG, etc).
• Enable Flash uploader means to turn on the capability to upload multiple images and files at a time.

I've ignored some of the settings here, as they are fairly advanced. Leave them set to their defaults.

Set "Enable Flash Uploader" to YES and click the Save button in the upper right. The bottom of the Media Manager screen will update to a new looking interface:

Browse files will let you browse to the right folder containing your images and files on your hard drive. Start upload will start uploading the files you've chosen to put into the Media Manager. Clear List clears the list of files to be uploaded and those that have already been uploaded.

Being able to upload multiple images and files at once is a huge improvement to Joomla's usability. You can also use this functionality for uploading images via the Images button at the bottom of the article editing windows.

You might also notice the Permissions tab at the top of the Options window. And also notice how I skipped over that! This tab is part of the new ACL (access control levels) system installed in Joomla. ACL is a pretty tough topic, and it merits its own articles.

I hope the newly restored multiple file upload feature makes you as happy as it makes me! This will save me tons of time as I work on client's websites.