Wordpress Plugins for the Media Library

Getting The Most of  Wordpress’ Media Library

After a couple of years of faithfully using Dean’s FCK Editor, we changed over to Tiny MCE Advanced Plugin- mostly because we wanted to take advantage of the new timthumb auto-thumbnailer coding of our new Arthemis Premium theme. (Though if I had read this post by Justin Tadlock, Boy Genius, I would have probably stuck with my Studiopress theme…)

Tiny MCE Advanced Plugin

This plugin adds 16 plugins to TinyMCE, WordPress’ wysiwyg editor- Advanced hr, Advanced Image, Advanced Link, Context Menu, Emotions (Smilies), Full Screen, IESpell, Layer, Media, Nonbreaking, Print, Search and Replace, Style, Table, Visual Characters and XHTML Extras- pluss allows you the flexibility of choosing the layout and options for the post editor tool bar. Another nice things about this plugin is that it can import all css classes or you can choose to add inline css classes (which comes in handy when you want to use other plugins like Javascript Pull Quotes)

-Click on any thumbnail to see a larger image-

One of the drawbacks is the image library management. If you use the Tiny MCE image insert button- it asks for a url. This means that you would still have to use the native wordpress media upload functions. Dean’s FCK Editor could upload and organize your image files in appropriate folders- a great help when your blog is as image heavy as ours.Tiny MCE Advanced Plugin couldn’t match that function.**

Uploads Folder Plugin by Semilogic

The problem of stuffing uploads folders with images and files in some orderly manner was solved by the Uploads Folder Plugin by Semilogic. This plugin organizes your images in folders linked to the post name and publishing date. These folders are created automatically and will be recreated if you change the publishing date. If there are plugins which are squeamish with this new setup, I haven’t found them yet.

Enable Media Replace plugin

I think everyone who publishes articles with a lot of images and illustrations should consider the Enable Media Replace plugin.  It is a great problem solver. In the event that you need to change an image in a post, or many posts that use a particular image, this plugin makes it possible to update the image without having to ftp an image with the same name in the right folder or uploading a new image and inserting it into the post.

**If you are having any issues with TinyMCE adding br/ lines, see this post. If they still appear I suspect the culprit is the use of an image caption. Need a quick fix? Delete the image caption. To follow the discussion, see comments here.

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