Healing links in markup to outdated media filenames is great. Redirect on top?

  • Resolved abitofmind

    (@abitofmind)


    1 year, 8 months ago

    Media File Renamer Settings > Tab “Basic” > Section “Side Updates”
    When the files are renamed, many links to them on your WordPress might be broken. Those options are updating the references to those files. 
    For: ☑︎ Posts ☑︎ Excerpts ☑︎ Post Meta ☑︎ Elementor

    1) “Side Updates” possibly is a typo?

    • Intended name being “Site Updates” (as in “Web Site”)?
    • Or maybe intentionally as in “Side effect” of the file renaming is to also update the markup?

    2) Now on the topic itself: Praise! Great feature! 👍

    a) Glad that I finally discovered a plugin that heals the root cause: Correcting the outdated media URLs in the markup of the respective posts rather than just doctoring around with redirections.

    Redirections are a legit method to cope with incoming external deeplinks to outdated media filenames. To not loose your link juice SEO.

    But for incoming internal links they are the wrong medicine. There will always be a redirection from old-file-name.jpg to new-file-name.jpg as long as you don’t treat the root cause, being the outdated internal links. This extra HTTP call for each affected media file slows down unnecessarily.

    Healing the root cause is the correct medicine. And the root cause are outdated links in the markup of your own posts. That should be a core feature of any CMS. All wikis I know of do this since the early 2000ies. WordPress not to this day. The link is the core of the www so to speak. Strange why this had no priority.

    3) Similar topic: I submitted this UX design proposal
    When changing a slug offer options to update internal incoming links
    That was for slug changes. No reaction so far. Maybe interesting for you to follow.

    4) Anyways: Glad that at least for renaming media files I know have an automatic link healing solution with your plugin. Thank you!

    a) Adding a redirection to also handle incoming external deeplinks which may used the old filename could theoretically be added on top of this measure.

    b) Does your plugin do that? I saw no indications for this.

    c) Would your plugin interfere with any other plugins such as Broken Link Checker or Redirection which possibly detect a media file name change and set up a redirection from old-name.jpg to new-name.jpg ? (Am not sure whether they act only on post/page-slugs and media-slugs, or also really on changed media filenames and set up a redirection for this. Possible not as by normal means in WordPress a filename once uploaded is frozen, at most you edit its media-slug)

    Curious to know! And thanks again for the plugin!

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Jordy Meow

    (@tigroumeow)

    1 year, 7 months ago

    Hi @abitofmind,

    Thanks a lot for this amazing feedback 🙂 Love it!

    1) “Side Updates” possibly is a typo?

    Indeed, it’s more like a side-effect 🙂 Basically it goes through your content to apply the new filenames, by looking for the old filenames. Should I name this differently?

    a) Glad that I finally discovered a plugin that heals the root cause: Correcting the outdated media URLs in the markup of the respective posts rather than just doctoring around with redirections.

    Thanks 🙂

    3) Similar topic: I submitted this UX design proposal
    When changing a slug offer options to update internal incoming links
    That was for slug changes. No reaction so far. Maybe interesting for you to follow.

    They will never do it. I am used to WordPress and their team, and it’s something that will never go in the core. The main reason is that, I believe, it’s slightly complicated, tricky, and might fail depending on the other plugins you are using. And WordPress only wants to have safe “features” in its code, and leave the difficulties to the third-party plugins. Otherwise, they would have a way to rename a file too (after all, isn’t just a field to add :p). Redirection is the best way as for now, as you mentioned.

    a) Adding a redirection to also handle incoming external deeplinks which may used the old filename could theoretically be added on top of this measure.

    Somehow, it’s something I have added secretly in the Pro Version, if you have the Redirection plugin installed. Thing is I thought it was too much to handle the redirections natively (would be a big chunk of code and UI to add), and if I had added it officially, I think it can cause so many issues potentially that I prefer it to be discreet and for the Pro users only. Also, I don’t really recommend it; the less redirections, the less for Redirection to check at every request coming it. If we add the filenames, I think that would be way too much and would have a hit on performance.

    Would your plugin interfere with any other plugins such as Broken Link Checker or Redirection which possibly detect a media file name change and set up a redirection from old-name.jpg to new-name.jpg ?

    I didn’t note any interference, and Redirection doesn’t do that natively (from what I know).

    Curious to know! And thanks again for the plugin!

    And thanks for being curious, made me think about all this as well, which is good 🙂 Cheers!

    Thread Starter abitofmind

    (@abitofmind)

    1 year, 7 months ago

    Ad 1) Thanks for confirming what it actually is. I propose these changes in your wording/layout:

    Link Healing

    When you rename media files, many links to them on your WordPress Site might get broken. After a media file renaming event the plugin will try to update the respective media file references in the following scope:

    Boolean options plus help text.

    Finally a disclaimer section at the very end:

    The plugin will try to update the file references in the following HTML attributes/tags: src, srcset in IMG ; src in VIDEO ; style attribute (individual CSS) in any HTML element. It cannot perform replacements in the CSS of your theme or in plugins (e.g. gallery plugins) which encode filepaths not in clear text file references but instead use some binary encoding or ID references. You have to update those manually. Give it a try, every install is different and it might not work for certain kind of references.

    Changes:

    • Headline changes entirely
    • Insertion of “media” in front of “files” to convey the idea more specifically and quickly.
    • The part on attributes/tags I wrote speculatively/exemplary. Intention: There should be a sentence/paragraph which explains where the plugins attempts to replace media-file-references.

    Ad 3) Thanks for your estimation why link healing (which to me is a CMS core functionality) will nevertheless not make it into the WordPress Core.

    Ad 4a) Great that redirections are added when renaming a file! This feature should be advertised in the plugin description and the documented in your plugin documentation for one’s presales research, as this is possibly a decision factor to purchase the Pro version! Also totally makes sense to not re-invent the wheel but hand that over to an established plugin for that task, which is the Redirection plugin.

    • Could you please add documentation on the interplay between your Pro variant of the plugin and the Redirection plugin?
    • What exact kind of redirection (relative link, absolute link, full URL with domain name and transport scheme)?
    • Into what redirection group?
    • This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by abitofmind.
    • This reply was modified 1 year, 7 months ago by abitofmind.
    Thread Starter abitofmind

    (@abitofmind)

    1 year, 6 months ago

    You clarified you have not enough time for correspondence. Hence briefly:

    Ad 1) I provided copy text. No need to answer me. I hope this material makes it into UI and help docs.

    Ad 4a) Integration of the Media File Renamer plugin into the Redirection plugin: I hope my questions potentially help how/what to cover in the documentation.

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