The thin line between library and database
I mentioned a few situations in the previous entry when the plugin is used, but shouldn’t. There are situations when WPMovieLibrary is not the best tool you can find for what you want to do; it has limitations and weaknesses that could do you more harm than help. Let’s explain this a bit.
TL;DR
- You’re running a personal blog with a few hundred movies you want to share with friends and families? You’re doing it right.
- You’re running a streaming/warez website with thousands of torrents available for download? You’re doing it wrong.
- You’re running a movie database/review website with thousands of entries? You’re doing it wrong.
The legal thing
There’s of course the legal question; if you’re in the warez/streaming stuff, you shouldn’t use WPMovieLibrary. I know streaming is not illegal per se, unless you don’t have the legal permission; but let’s be honest, about 99.9% of the streaming websites I’ve seen running the plugin are completely illegal. Same goes for warez. And from a moral point of view, you shouldn’t expect me to provide any help on building/maintaining such websites, no matter what fee you can offer to pay.
The resource thing
Even if you’re completely legal, WPMovieLibrary is not necessarily the best plugin for your site, especially if you’re dealing with thousands of movies. The plugin was built for “human-sized” libraries, and therefore has a heavy impact on the database; it’s intended to run on servers with little amount of visitors and absolutely not optimized for websites seeing hundreds or thousands of daily visits. If you’re running such sites you should not be expecting a perfect behavior.
The usability thing
Another thing you should note is that there are some case where WPMovieLibrary will come to its natural limits. A good example is the movie importer; this feature has been built as a tool for the first usages of the plugin, when you have dozens of movies you want to add quickly instead of creating posts manually. But if you try to import 6,000 movies in a single row, you shouldn’t be surprised to experience weird things! Hopefully version 3.0 will make it way easier to import big lists, but still, you should use that feature parsimoniously to avoid any browser crash or API timeout due to a massive number of queries.
Developers are your friends
If you find yourself to be in one of the wrong situations described here, keep in mind that WPMovieLibrary is a free software; you’ll easily find a developer for hire to hack through the plugin’s code and help you build your website in a more suited way than simply running a general plugin. I myself am for hire and will be glad to work with you… As long as its not warez, and not until I’m done with version 3.0 😉
Voila que les choses sont un peu plus clair.
Impatient de cette nouvelle version.
Pourra t’elle tourner convenablement sur un NAS ?