Explore General Layout and Scope

[shaunandrews]

I'd love to see something from this project make it into WordPress 4.0. The current plugin is more of a prototype than a real plugin. It has some interesting explorations, including the size slider, and the very simple grid layout — but it diverges from the media modal, which is the more modern UI for media in WordPress.

I think our initial goal should be to adapt the existing Media Modal code/layout and "drop" it in the Media Library. The Media Modal is really geared towards browsing and inserting media into a post, so perhaps we can adapt as need for more managed-related tasks like editing, sorting, and deleting media. I worked up a few sketches around the idea of adapting the existing Media Modal layout:

This shows the Media Library with a few selected items. The sidebar from the modal is used to show a few details and bulk options for selected items.

Selecting just a single item can show some editable fields.

Searching for media means you likely know something about the item, so results show a two-column list view to help you scan for text-based information like the item name.

You can filter by media "type," including something called Collections...

Collections are kind of like folders. Perhaps there's a few default ones (Images, Audio, etc) and you'll have the ability to create new Collections. I haven't sketched out the process of making a new Collection, but it could be cool to have a few ways of doing so:

1. Simply selecting a bunch of images.
2. Choose one or more tags/categories (this would require the ability to tag media)

Clicking on a Collection would show you a more standard looking grid view of the items contained within that Collection.

There's a lot left to thing about here, including:

• If you can select multiple items, is the ability to have editable fields for a single selected item obvious? Is it obvious that you can click to deselect?
• Uploading new items? It should be as simple as dragging-and-dropping anywhere on the screen. Doing so inside a Collection could add those uploads to that collection. (The entire upload processed could probably work like it does in the modal.)
• How do you create collections?
• I imagine that the sidebar is a permanent fixture, and remains throughout any of the screens shown above. This would let you select items, perform a search, select more items, browse a collections, and select even more items — and then maybe create a new post with those items, or delete those items, or download those items, or do something with those items.
• I'm sure there's a ton more that I'm forgetting.

[ericandrewlewis]

I really like the idea of collections, and have toyed around with implementations in the past for clients.

We should consider making Collections as a hierarchical taxonomy, which would give us a filesystem-like organization to media.