SiteNow has support for images, documents, audio files, and content from external sources like YouTube, Vimeo, X (Twitter), Facebook, and the University of Iowa's UI Capture (Panopto) service. Collectively these are known as media items and that is how they are referred to throughout SiteNow. To learn more about the individual media types, click one of the links in the menu to learn more.

You can view all your website's media items on the Media Overview page (located at /admin/content/media). This page provides a sortable, filterable list of media items along with common actions for each item.

For documentation on the management of content items, see our content management page.

Filename Sanitization

In order to follow best practices for online file management, search engine optimization, and to help with interactions with other Drupal systems, some filenames may automatically be adjusted on upload. These adjustments include:

  • Accented characters will be replaced by their single or multiple non-accented character equivalents
  • Whitespaces and non-alphanumeric characters will be replaced by dashes (-)
  • Repeated dashes, underscores, and periods will be reduced to a single instance of that character

Replacing a File

When using media entities within your content, you have the option to replace the underlying file (pdf, jpeg, etc.) served by the media entity. If done properly this means you don't need to update all the content where the media is placed and referenced.

By default, a replacement file will upload as new, including an absolute URL to the file and the media item will reference it instead of the old file. The old file will remain on the server temporarily but will no longer be tied to the media item. It will then be flagged for deletion and cleaned up during a garbage collection process that runs approximately every hour. Once removed from the server, the old file's URL will return a HTTP status code of 404 (Page not found).

There is an option to Overwrite original file. When checked, this will replace by overwriting the original file. The contents of the new file will be written to the old file and it will retain the same filename and direct URL (e.g. ../2020-09/filename.pdf). This method is only recommended for document files (e.g. pdf, docx, etc.) accessed directly and not through a media entity placed within the website. Examples would be browser bookmarks, hard-coded links in emails, documents or external websites. If the original filename did not follow current filename sanitization rules, the original filename will still be preserved.

Caching

Similar to other content on the website, when the media entity is updated we attempt to invalidate caches for the media entity and the derivatives (image styles). For performances reasons, most files, are cached for up to a year if left unmodified. The "File" document media type is only cached for 1 hour. This is to help aid with clearing browser caches for documents that are replaced and overwritten using the Overwrite original file checkbox. For files with a longer cache lifetime, it is suggested the user delete their browser data or try accessing the file through a different browser. If you suspect that the caching is wide-spread across many browsers, deleting the file and creating a new file with a different name to serve is recommended.

Deleting Media

You can delete media items through the Media Overview page (admin/content/media) or by clicking the Delete tab next to the Edit and Usage tabs on a media item. Only select this option if your intention is to remove a media item forever, as there is no recovery option.

When you click the Delete button, a warning message will be displayed with a link to the Usages tab where you can find and clean up references to the media item. 

If you think you may need to upload the file again, but also do not want it on the site, we recommend that you download the file and/or save it to a shared file storage space for future review before deleting the file. You can always re-upload it in the future.

When you delete a media item, keep the following in mind.

  • Once you are able to delete the media item, editors won't be able to reference/place the media item anymore on the website.
  • The actual file on the server will still exist for about one hour until the garbage collection process runs.
  • There can be certain situations where the file on the server is not properly deleted. We can trigger site-wide cache clearing to free this up and/or investigate why the file was not released. Please contact us if you suspect that either of these are the case.

Usages

Sometimes while auditing a media item, you may want to find all places it is referenced or used. For this, you can click on the Usage tab next to the Edit and Delete tabs while viewing a media item. From here, you will find all pages that the media item is referenced from with various information on how it is used.

Each entry will link you directly to the content that the media item is referenced on. It is important to note however that the media item may be referenced in revisions that are not on the currently published version of that content.

Note: While this tool may find some or all references to the media item, it is not considered to be 100% accurate.