Why Cloudup is Not Replacing the WordPress Media Library

When Automattic acquired Cloudup in 2013, two of the most exciting parts of the announcement was replacing the WordPress media library with Cloudup and the ability to co-edit posts similar to Google Docs. We discussed the concept in early 2014 and readers were concerned about owning their data.

Two years later, the WordPress media library and the visual post editor have received major improvements while integration with Cloudup is non-existent. When Matt Mullenweg was asked about the integration in a recent interview, he responded,

We did a lot of really awesome UI improvements to the editor and did some things we were very excited about, but because we weren’t working on a TinyMCE base, some of the basic editing stuff was really difficult.

The team spent about six months to complete the first 80% of the project then spent a year and a half to reach 85%. Setbacks included a lot of rabbit holes and hidden complexity. The team now works on different things within Automattic that revolve around data.

Zeditor is an Educational Resource

The work completed by the team is open source and available on GitHub. It’s called Zeditor and serves as an educational resource. “We learned a ton through the way we architected the JavaScript and we think it serves as a good model for doing lots of JavaScript projects going forward,” Mullenweg said.

Listen to Mullenweg explain why Cloudup is not replacing the WordPress media library in the following audio clip. Be sure to check out the entire interview where we discuss a variety of other WordPress topics.