The social cms

Think about your favorite CMS and how it handles digital asset management. It gives you the ability to upload pictures, videos, audio files and every other possible document format that exists, right?

Imagine that the asset management didn’t store your uploads on your hosting’s disk space? Imagine you could link it to the social services that are out there?

Images could be uploaded to flickr or picasa, videos to vimeo or youtube, audio files to soundcloud, presentations to slideshare, … The only real problem would be other file formats, but if you have a dropbox account you can easily get a public download link for them.

Advantages:

  • if you ever have to move your site to a different website you don’t have to change most of the URLs (e.g moving wordpress to a different domain)
  • your files are available via a CDN, so they won’t slow down your page load.
  • less disk space usage on your hosting
  • these social services make sure your media plays nice, e.g. video files get converted to FLV’s and have an HTML5 fallback, same for audio files, images on flickr can be queried to return an image of your requested dimensions, etc…

Disadvantages:

  • If your social service discontinues you’re pretty much screwed
  • if your social service changes their API it would break your CMS’ asset management

This is just an idea that I have been playing with for quite some time, I don’t know if it is doable or even smart to do but I’ve always been intrigued by the possibilities. It could be that I’ve forgotten some pros/cons or that I missed something crucial, if so, please let me know.

About joggink

I'm a freelance frontend developer and a proud member of the dutch fronteers.

10. April 2011 by joggink
Categories: webrelated | Tags: , , | 5 comments

Comments (5)

  1. Steven Vandevelde says April 10, 2011 at 2:38 pm

    Neat idea. But I would just use Amazon S3.

  2. joggink says April 10, 2011 at 2:44 pm

    I know, but I was thinking about the added value these services give you. For instance flickr gives you the possibility to get not only the available square/small/medium/large/original, but you can also pass your own parameters to get the appropriate size. The fact that vimeo / youtoube convert your video file to an FLV with an HTML5 fallback, etc… The ease these services provide in making sure your media works anywhere, anytime and the fact they deliver it the way you want seem like a real timesaver. So storing your media on amazon S3 is one thing, but making sure it has the appropriate dimensions / convert it to an FLV / html5 fallback for video & audio / etc. seem like a huge pro. I should definitely add this one to the list ;-)

  3. Bramus! says April 13, 2011 at 9:03 pm

    Aha, a tactic I’ve been using on some traffic heavy sites: all assets are hosted on their appropriate services (even on Facebook) in order to preserve bandwith :-)

    Above that some of the services (such as YouTube, Flickr) also work as a gateway linking to the site :-)

  4. joggink says April 15, 2011 at 11:24 am

    @Bramus! Exactly! Use them as CDN and benefit even more when people visit your site via your social service

  5. Tom Hermans says October 8, 2011 at 5:03 pm

    This is no “new” idea, but indeed a good one. I’ve done it for a few sites as well, to minimize traffic + you often get attention on those other channels as well (e.g. YouTube) which you can use to direct traffic back to your site as well..

    There are also a number of services and/or plugins for popular CMS’es like WordPress (and Drupal, Joomla too I gues), where assets automatically get transferred to e.g. Amazon S3, or assets get pulled from flickr accounts etc..