My brother works as a musician. He composes music for all sorts of things and, really, that’s where his need for a digital asset management system (DAMS) comes in. He’s got somewhere near 400 pieces of music and that number is only growing.
His clients, however, aren’t fond of searching a huge alphabetized list of content. They want to be able to search by tempo, by genre, by mood, et cetera. This is where WordPress can make itself useful. It already has an asset management system in it (at least in some respects).
Basically, every asset you enter into WP (image, song, video, whatever) is treated like a post — it gets an ID, a location, a description, and a title. So all that I needed to do was to add tagging to these assets, make those tags searchable by the front-end search, and build the front-end such that when someone landed on an asset that they could listen to it without having to download it.
This required a set of plug ins (asset tags, music players, and search enhancements) and then some modest front-end coding. But, suffice it to say, it was significantly easier than I thought it might be. Granted, the version that my brother is using would be much better with some obvious enhancements (e.g., making the audio player and download link appear in searches).
But it’s surprisingly easy for him to manage and definitely quite usable from a client perspective — that is, assuming that they know what they should be searching for.
