WordPress Plugin v2 (Beta) - Feedback

Hello Cloudinary team,

firstly thank you a lot for your great service. I tested cloudinary for a month to share my results with the Czech WordPress community in my article and the results were amazing.

I finally got a notification about your new plugin v2... thanks for that honestly... the previous one was not so good :)))

The new plugin is great. I love simple solutions and I think your new plugin is much better in this. So I've been testing it for a few days and I have some thoughts:

1) Individual transformation - I know that you support individual transformations but it's maybe little bit hard to set for a classic user of WordPress. Unfortunately, I did not understand this from your description here https://cloudinary.com/documentation/wordpress_plugin (maybe I have a leaky head) but I can imagine that it will be difficult for a human to just manage content. Good example is level of compression. When I set the level to Auto Eco (globally) you may find that one image is not easy to read. In that case the user needs simple setup to change the compression for this one image directly in the editor (preferably in Gutenberg, it has rich settings for image block)... or maybe better explanation with screenshots or video guide. Just thinking :-)

2) Automatic Sync - That's a great feature but I can imagine a situation where I need it to turn it off. For example if I have some portal with user photos/images and images can be uploaded manually from front-end form. These images will be added/uploaded to WordPress media library but I need to approve them. It can be spam or inappropriate content. So I need to approve their post with their images and then upload/sync to Cloudinary library. So I suggest to add a checbox to Sync Media tab which will turn off automatic synchronization and add upload button for every item in WordPress Media Library for manual upload/sync. Of course, only for images that have not yet been uploaded.

3) Media folders - Maybe it would be good if the plugin could save images to Cloudinary even in folders by date (just like WordPress does if it is set). From options you can see if this parameter is active and then set it to upload to Cloudinary. In the end, it would be good if this option could be turned off (completely) again on the Sync tab but by default it would behave according to what is set in WordPress.

4) DB Queries - Your plugin adds some DB queries. For example 5 queries (cloudinary_general, cloudinary_global_video_transformations, cloudinary_sync_media, _transient_timeout__cloudinary_usage, _transient__cloudinary_usage) are from options table. I think you can solve these items by adding an autoload parameter. It's not a big deal but I see a problem with the number of queries for the images themselves. Here is my testing:

Clean installation of WordPress with only 2 plugins and Twenty Nineteen template.

GUTENBERG (only Query Monitor)

1. Without content - 12Q
2. 1xParagraph - 12Q
3. 1xParagraph, 1xImage - 14Q
4. 2xParagraph, 3xImage, 1xColumns - 14Q
5. 3xParagraph, 3xImage, 1xColumns, 1xGallery (6 images, 3 already used in previous content) - 14Q

This means that if you use some image block (it doesn't matter if it's gallery or single image) it will use 2 queries for all images regardless of their amount in a post and that's great.

GUTENBERG (Cloudinary v2 + Query Monitor)

1. Without content - 17Q
2. 1xParagraph - 17Q
3. 1xParagraph, 1xImage - 19Q
4. 2xParagraph, 3xImage, 1xColumns - 23Q
5. 3xParagraph, 3xImage, 1xColumns, 1xGallery (6 images, 3 already used in previous content) - 29Q

This means that Cloudinary adds 5 queries after activating plugin (I already mentioned above) and 2 queries for every image in content. This can consume server load when there is a gallery with 50 images for example. 

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I don't know how exactly Gutenberg works but my theory is that when the page loads Gutenberg retrieves all URL images at once so it can be handy for you retrieving the URLs from Cloudinary and you will not need any further queries. But it is just a theory and I hope you want to see it for yourself because it can be a problem when it will be used on photo blogs, etc.

That's all, as I said the plugin is good and these are just my ideas for improvement.

With regards
Adam