Great idea – horrified by virtual folders

  • Resolved thezman

    (@thezman)


    3 years, 7 months ago

    I recently worked with a client on a major upgrade to their WP membership system. They had your plugin, and ~50 GIGS of images in a membership type website where users have been uploading away to their hearts content… lol

    They are hosted on WPengine and using up too much space. So we need to carefully migrate and offload onto CloudHosting

    So, as I am looking around in the wp-admin panel I see previous dev’s had created a hook to make separate folders for each user in filebird

    from the WP admin panel the whole filebird system “looks nice”

    I am thinking “this will be easy to migrate and work with”

    NOPE – TO MY HORROR
    I discovered the filebird filesystem is ALL VIRTUAL.

    What we are now dealing with is 50 Gigs of images (think about that). On average each image is 250kb to 1mb… we are talking 250,000+ times 4 (multiple sizes) so easily 1,000,000 images… UNORGANIZED… floating around in the wp-content folder like pure madness. LOL (its horrible)

    This whole time the owner thought “everything was perfectly organized, I used the filebird plugin and paid for customizations!”

    So, I show the owner what’s REALLY going on…
    A Million file unorganized mess

    Now, at this point my best bet for organizing the system is to somehow use the API you set up (which is cool) to then go actually make the filesystem match the “virtual system” but that does not help out with the database records problem.

    So, here is both so praise and constructive feedback:
    1- COOL IDEA! I love the idea. filebird “looks like it works”
    2- BIG PROBLEM! Every “virtual folder” up here should have been a real folder

    Suggestions:
    A) Make a checkbox in settings to have “actual folders”
    B) Make a tool in settings to “convert” virtual folders into real ones
    C) Add a setting that says “Organize users subfolders into date/year”

    If those things had been done we would be able to simply run some SCP commands to sync only the folders/files we needed or break up the import.

    I know what the solution is here and am capable of fixing it
    I just want to put this experience on your radar.

    Maybe you have a script that can handle this?
    Perhaps this is a feature in the pro version?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Support Bruce

    (@ninjateamwp)

    3 years, 7 months ago

    Hi @thezman ,

    Thanks for using FileBird.

    So, even though FileBird does not handle real folders, it however allows you to download the entire folder structures, which you can then upload to your library again or to another library or in fact, upload to your site via File manager:

    https://ninjateam.gitbook.io/filebird/filebird-library-left-section/how-to-download-folders-and-files

    https://ninjateam.gitbook.io/filebird/filebird-library-left-section/how-to-upload-folders-and-files

    Hope that helps.

    Kind regards,
    -Bruce-

    Thread Starter thezman

    (@thezman)

    3 years, 7 months ago

    It does not help, but thank you for your reply.

    Please consider my comment a feature request.
    Here is a suggestion: make it very clear to users that only virtual folders are created.

    You can sell this idea as being “light weight” – I can see the benefit of having only virtual folders makes things easier for you as a plugin developer.

    However, I also feel it necessary to point out how badly my client was ‘mislead’ into thinking they had real folder structures on the server. This was tragic, because the plugin sure “looked like it works”.

    To be fair to you – yes, I was able to find information about this online, however, I had to dig/research to find that out and this “virtual folder” thing is so very important that it ought to be in big red letters on every page of documentation.

    I know what to do here

    Plugin Support Bruce

    (@ninjateamwp)

    3 years, 7 months ago

    Hi @thezman ,

    Thanks and we will take your feature suggestion to the developers table.

    Kind regards,
    -Bruce-

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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