The time has come, hasn't it? Previously, I announced on my blog (chaseraz.com) that the Multinewmedia podcast would be coming to an end. Season 2018 had "podfaded" but would finish all 30 episodes, even if it took the remainder of 2019 as well. Either way, at Episode 120, this iteration of the podcast will be finished.
So...
Here I am. Writing in the basic multimedia CMS that I've been building specifically for Multinewmedia. Is it perfect? No. Is it a WordPress replacement? No. But it does have an amazing ability to grow and manage libraries of different multimedia types easily without the need for infinite plugins. Webflow seems to be doing something similar, but they're calling their libraries "collections". Who cares about semantics in this case?! I'm just happy to see someone else with a similar idea on managing multiple media types: blogs, news releases, videos, podcasts, etc. all in one place.
But that got me thinking... what if not being a WordPress replacement is our saving grace? As the show shuts down, I'll likely stop doing anything with this technology. Sure, the first version of this CMS idea is 15 years old now and came about way before Multinewmedia was ever thought of, but does this CMS really have to die now that I've moved onto other managed platforms? Multinewmedia was my last playground for hand-coding things for fun... but, that doesn't solve the problem of still not having too many great viable options for managing all of these media types in one nice interface.
WordPress (as you can tell by my repeated mentions of it) may be the spark that's necessary.
What if this CMS lives on as not just a stand-alone tool, but a system that decides to focus in on the issue of how to address multimedia collections?
Think about the current workflow: Install WordPress, have a blog. If you need a second blog, you're generally covered now way more than you used to be. But now you launch a podcast. And maybe a second podcast. And you want to showcase your YouTube videos... you can look at the Multinewmedia home page and get a good sense of what we mean. A blog and podcast not just on the same user interface, but in the same control interface. True, this can be done on any platform... but what if we added two more podcasts, a series of PDF whitepapers, and two or three distinct YouTube channels or playlists? That's actually not so easy... even in 2019.
This leaves me wondering: does anyone else see value in evolving a way to manage multimedia libraries and the collections of services, platforms, and formats used to serve them? If so, maybe this project can be open sourced. If not, tell me why below and show me the tools that I've missed that will already allow this behavior.
As always, now it's your turn... hit me up in the comments!
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