Managing Your Files Within the CMS

I got an interesting email this morning from Paul Olinger, in Academic Planning and Faculty Development, asking if there was a way to create folders within the Media bin under Content and thought everyone might benefit from the answer before your Media files become too numerous.

Unfortunately, there is NOT a way to create folders or sub-folders for the content added to your Media bin. However, with some planning ahead, you can emulate a folder system by coming up with a naming standard that will allow you to sort the files. For example, you might name all the photos and files you upload for your "history" section as history-photoname-001.jpg or history-louisiane-article3.pdf.

Or, for another example, if you wanted to be able to easily find all uploaded forms, you could put the word "form" first in it's name, i.e. form-intl-student-app.pdf, when you upload the file.

If you are going to have a lot of uploaded media on your pages, starting some kind of naming standard would definitely be in your, and your successors', best interest for future ease of use.

Another thing to bear in mind while you are building your pages, is REMEMBER TO BACK UP YOUR DATA. If you are already used to making all your changes to content while you're in the CMS, take a moment to quickly copy and paste all your pages into a Word doc and save in a folder called "My Website Content"—it's a matter of a few minutes that could save you hours later!

Maybe even more important, if, say, we encountered the absolute worst case scenario of a site-wide failure with data loss—is BACKUP ALL PHOTOS AND .PDFs that you've uploaded to your site. Want to be a happy over-achiever with zero worries? Put all those files in a folder marked "My Website Media" and make sure that each file is named exactly what it was named when you uploaded it into the CMS. Huzzah!

If you have any questions or comments, please chime in below!