A close friend is starting a new life and wants to Vlog the experience. Of course I’m setting her up with WordPress. Let’s talk about a personal Video site.
She’s not a blogger and this isn’t for public consumption yet, just for family and friends. She wants to post lots of pictures and videos and write about her new world.
The site is locked to registration with a signup code ( Thank You, Branda! ). However, while there is no monetization, I will probably replace the registration with a membership plugin to restrict all content except the homepage to logged-in users.
Note: Some membership plugins don’t protect media by default. I need to make sure the pics and vids are only accessed by logged-in users. We’re only protecting the content because she’s new at this. At some point the site will probably be open to colleagues and others in her circles, so permissions will change.
She tends to take pics with an iPhone, and uploads at full size. I’m going to rely heavily on Smush here.
I don’t think Smush can do anything with videos. The default format is MP4 and they are huge : over 10MB per minute. I understand MP4 is just a wrapper around the actual content. Can anyone recommend a way to crunch vids?
Another feature, with which I have no experience, is video streaming. I don’t mean live streaming. I mean streaming from the server to a client browser, usually mobile these days, so that the client doesn’t need to completely download a video before playing … exactly like YouTube and every other modern service.
Any suggestions for plugins or technology for this?
I already have a basic theme for the site but I think it will be better to use a theme that is designed for vloggers. Any recommendations?
Because she is not already a blogger, we’re working out a workflow where she will draft content, and I will check content and format it prior to publication. (We agree that when someone is starting with this that it’s helpful to “pre-flight” check for personal details that might be OK for friends but that shouldn’t escape into the public.)
To keep things easy I’ll ask her to use the Classic Editor, and I’ll convert to Gutenberg, assign templates, etc. I expect we’ll soon transition to a Gutenberg-first approach. Does anyone have experience to comment on that workflow?
Related, I want to make sure she doesn’t accidentally post to Production. This implies a formal workflow and post status changes from Draft to Edit to Review and then to Published.
Can someone recommend a plugin or other approach for this? (If not, I know there are magazine/agency plugins for article flow like this.)
I welcome thoughts about using WordPress for this specific application, which I believe is becoming much more common.
Thanks!
EDIT: This is all hosted on my server, so Jetpack VideoPress and similar services that host content will not be used.