I hope this is the appropriate place for this question. I am upgrading a Joomla v.3 site to v5 for our non-profit academic organisation. Our organisation has published a number of newsletters and journals to its members, as well as have recorded a number of video lectures over the years. Access to a number of recent newsletters and journals as well as the videos is restricted to current bona fide members although some of our older newsletters and journals are freely accessible to anyone, member or not, via our website. Newsletters and journals are in the form of .PDF files, hour-long videos are in the form of .MP4 files.
Until now, we have embedded access to all of these items, and those that are restricted are locked behind a log-in. (the log-in is a generic one which every current member has access to - there are just too many members to administer and we haven't set up individual self-registration, since membership's tied to joining our society). However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to backup and copy those backups using Akeeba between our hosting account and our offline WAMP server based in our small office, and currently results in at least 5 backup component files of 2+ Gbytes each, and a few hours wait while files are transferred to or fro!
My question, therefore is two-fold. Firstly, is it better sense to lock all PDFs and MP4s in a 'hidden' and restricted sub-directory elsewhere on our server, and accessing those is only via some sort of link(s) on a 'members only' page on our site? (we currently have a number of sub-directories in our website that contain newsletters, journals and videos). Links are easy enough to build on a page, of course, and removing the various files to an external directory will cut down on the size of the back-ups enormously. Or is it still better to contain our growing number of 'media files' within our Joomla file structure?
Secondly, checking through the various extensions advertised on the Joomla site, there appear to be a number of extensions that allow the playing of media files, extensions both free and paid, but these all seem to embed the media files within the website, or alternatively embed such freely available media such as [[youtube]] via links. Our own media is not stored on [[youtube]] so they won't be appropriate. Is there a sensible solution to this that would allow us to restrict access to certain individuals for some files and free access to everyone for other files, yet also give them links to these files if they are stored externally? Or do I just have to build a page within our site that includes the basic links to files (which, of course, is easy enough).
Thanks
Until now, we have embedded access to all of these items, and those that are restricted are locked behind a log-in. (the log-in is a generic one which every current member has access to - there are just too many members to administer and we haven't set up individual self-registration, since membership's tied to joining our society). However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to backup and copy those backups using Akeeba between our hosting account and our offline WAMP server based in our small office, and currently results in at least 5 backup component files of 2+ Gbytes each, and a few hours wait while files are transferred to or fro!
My question, therefore is two-fold. Firstly, is it better sense to lock all PDFs and MP4s in a 'hidden' and restricted sub-directory elsewhere on our server, and accessing those is only via some sort of link(s) on a 'members only' page on our site? (we currently have a number of sub-directories in our website that contain newsletters, journals and videos). Links are easy enough to build on a page, of course, and removing the various files to an external directory will cut down on the size of the back-ups enormously. Or is it still better to contain our growing number of 'media files' within our Joomla file structure?
Secondly, checking through the various extensions advertised on the Joomla site, there appear to be a number of extensions that allow the playing of media files, extensions both free and paid, but these all seem to embed the media files within the website, or alternatively embed such freely available media such as [[youtube]] via links. Our own media is not stored on [[youtube]] so they won't be appropriate. Is there a sensible solution to this that would allow us to restrict access to certain individuals for some files and free access to everyone for other files, yet also give them links to these files if they are stored externally? Or do I just have to build a page within our site that includes the basic links to files (which, of course, is easy enough).
Thanks
Statistics: Posted by robinsonpj — Tue Jun 11, 2024 8:52 am