Offsite storage integration

Hi all,

Completely new to web development so please excuse my nieve perspective

Would it be possible to incorporate some form of offsite storage as an option within ModX? Apologies for not being able to explain this in a better manner, but basically I envisage the ability to make use of Amazons S3 storage bank to store certain website content seamlessly. This would be invaluable if it could integrate with a gallery plugin for example, or as a file repository.

I’m afraid i’ve only just got passed the install stage with modx, so I’m unable to phrase this interms of its architecture.

Would something like this be possible? The ability to stream music from there would be another usefull application.

Just a thought.

Steve

As you are completely new:

A web page can reference content from another site by passing the full url, eg:


The part where this gets tricky is the "seamless" bit. The above is seamless for the website visitor, but for the website editor (you) it is more fiddly than using ’onsite’ files, because you need to know exactly where the file is.

Whilst you can navigate within MODx’s image browser to images on your MODx server, it isn’t able to list the files you have elsewhere. Many MODx galleries are dependent upon being able to list the local directory.

Now, I don’t know anything about Amazon’s S3 storage bank so I don’t know whether there are any tools or facilities to make this easier.

I know the issue of listing offsite directories has come up at least once but I’m unaware of any MODx solution.

However, the basic answer is that yes you can use offsite content, it’s just not as easy to select and manage as onsite content.

Well, you could put the main part of the link into a chunk, then your images could all be easily linked like {{imagelink}}image.jpg.

Thanks for the replies.

It was the "seamless" approach from an ’internal’ modex perspective that I was thinking of, making the offsite file store appear local effectively.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html?node=16427261 -- details of Amazons S3 storage in case anyones interested, it appears an extremely cost effective solution and has quite open interfaces.

What I was hoping to achieve was a gallery driven web site where users could upload pictures etc. but have them stored offsite. Your comments promted some futher thoughts thanks, I would anticipate that its possible to capture the url of the file upload in a database table and somehow link that back to the gallery output.

I think this could be the start of a rather steep learning curve for me lol.

Cheers,

Steve

Ah, Amazon S3; I see a lot of potential in this kind of service, especially for smaller businesses that can’t afford the infrastructure to host large amounts of bandwidth-intensive data. In fact, I just did an estimate a few days ago that involved using this Amazon web service and MODx to build a MySpace-like community that can share multi-media files. This is very doable, but will involve the need for interacting with the Amazon S3 remote procedure calls. So the answer is, yes, you can do this in MODx, but there is nothing in MODx (yet) that will specifically help you deal with Amazon S3. It’s just a web service and still requires the facilities to be implemented on your site that will make use of it.

Couldnt agree more - the scope for small businesses is huge.

From my own point of view it would allow me to run a hobby website where a simple balance could be struck between advertising and bandwidth cost, hopefully leading to a break even situation.