[wp-trac] [WordPress Trac] #10657: Allow many-to-many relationship between posts and attachments

[WordPress Trac]

#10657: Allow many-to-many relationship between posts and attachments
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 Reporter:  morgansson       |       Owner:
     Type:  feature request  |      Status:  new
 Priority:  normal           |   Milestone:  Future Release
Component:  Media            |     Version:  2.8.4
 Severity:  normal           |  Resolution:
 Keywords:  needs-patch      |
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Comment (by aesqe):

 I've spent a lot of time thinking about this problem, and, in my
 [http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/file-gallery/ File Gallery] plugin,
 this is how I've decided to implement a solution:

 - each attachment still has only one parent
 - if you want to reuse an attachment - you should duplicate it, especially
 if you're running a multi-language site and wish to have different
 captions on images, depending on language
 - when an attachment is duplicated, it retains all the data from the
 original attachment, but the actual attachment file is not duplicated on
 the file system
 - each duplicate gets a new meta field: "_is_copy_of", which contains the
 ID of the original attachment
 - each "original" attachment also gets a new meta field: "_has_copies",
 which contains IDs of all of its copies
 - these two meta fields are there for one reason only: if you want to
 delete an "original" attachment, you'll get a warning, giving you a few
 options as what to actually do: "delete all attachments and the file",
 "delete just the original attachment data, don't touch the file", "cancel"
 - if you choose "delete just the original attachment data", the first copy
 of the "original" becomes the new "original"
 - by default, the copies are filtered out of the media library, but that
 can be turned off easily on the settings page

 In over two years and after over 100 000 downloads, there haven't been any
 complaints about this approach, and I personally don't see any obvious
 downside to it. It may sound messy, but it wasn't that difficult to
 implement.

 I'd be grateful for any comments and suggestions.

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Ticket URL: <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/10657#comment:15>
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