Andy and Alex have been hard at work on it for some time. It’s really impressive and I’ve only started to play with it — it being searchable is a huge enough leap for me. I don’t use a lot of images and other media, so I’m eager to see what you experts think of the experience.

Lorelle describes it as hot. And Matt is eagerly waiting for it to be ready:

My pictures are ready to go, I’m just waiting for certain features within WordPress to start working and creating intermediate sizes so I can upload them to my blog instead of Gallery.

Andy responded

The Media Library only knows about files that have a record in the posts table with post_type = ‘attachment’. These records are created when you upload a file via WordPress. Uploading via FTP, etc., has no effect on the WordPress database.

We do not scan your upload directories and that is not now planned. I would like to see a plugin do this.

So Andy has dropped the gauntlet. Which plugin developer among you will rise to the challenge? You will garner much fame and admiration from your fellow WordPress participants!

Update: Less than 9 hrs since I published this, the amazing Dion Hulse, or as we know him, DD32, has created Add From Server:

A WordPress plugin which allows you to browse the filesystem on the webserver and copy any files into the WordPress uploads system, Once imported it’ll be treated as any other uploaded file, and you can access it via the Media Library.

On wp-testers list Dion adds:

While it doesnt scan the directories for new files, I just wrote up a plugin to allow importing files from the web servers filesystem into the WordPress uploads system.

It simply allows you to select files, and then import them into the uploads folder(They’re copied).

It needs more work obviously, And i’ll have to add some logic to detect that its adding a file from within the uploads folder to prevent duplication i guess.. Another function that i’d like to add is a watch-directory, Any files which get uploaded into that folder, get imported automatically (and optionally deleted from the source dir afterwards), But thats all for the next release in another week or so most likely.

It is a work in progress, as all great things are. Already this is going to make a lot of people happy!

84 students applied to work with WordPress as part of this year’s Google Summer of Code. All the applications were excellent, and it was incredible hard for our eight mentors to choose. Robert Deaton and I stretched a little bit and are mentoring two students each — I know the whole WordPress village will be helping us.

Today, I finished replying to each of the applicants that were not accepted. It was very hard. There are are so many fantastic proposals that I still hope see light — if you applied be sure to blog about your proposal! Although you will not be compensated, if you have the time, I am sure that there are many people that will help you.

Here are the 10 students and their projects that were accepted:

• Ronald Heft, Jr’s Podcasting Support (blog post), mentored by Lloyd Budd
• Mike Grouchy’s Comment Panel and Commenting System Additions (blog post), mentored by Peter Westwood
• Matthias Bauer’s Internationalization Revisited, mentored by Nikolay Bachiyski
• Keith Bowes’ Easier template tags, mentored by Andy Skelton
• Dion Hulse’s WordPress Update Plugin, mentored by Robert Deaton
• Corey Shaffer’s Helping Improve the Content Management of WordPress, mentored by Brian Layman
• Celeste Lyn Paul’s WordPress Market and Suitability Research and Prototyping (blog post), mentored by Matt Mullenweg
• Luc Bizeul’s Create Unit Test Framework for Editor Formatting, mentored by Lloyd Budd
• Bernardo Santos’s Hierarchical Page (list) Management using jQuery, mentored by Michael Adams
• Andrew Nelson’s Performance Testing, mentored by Robert Deaton

Welcome!

The summer of code starts May 28.

For those community members interested in tracking — or better yet participating in — the progress of the 10 projects over the summer, we have created a group for the students and mentors and a repository for their code.