Last month  I’ve released Media protect 1.0. Mediaprotect is an Umbraco  package that helps you protect media in the same simple way as you protect documents in Umbraco. Once the package is installed and you protect certain media, or content nodes, the files will be password protected. Only authenticated members can open the files, otherwise members will be redirected to the login screen.

The problem protecting media

No solution without a problem . When you use Umbraco, by default all media items can be accessed directly. If you have a media item that you don’t want to be accessed and someone knows the url (maybe got a link via email from a friend), or you have a link in your content  to a media item that is crawled by Google and the user uses that url the media item will be shown/downloaded, if you like it or not.

This is also the case with upload fields on a protected content node. The page is protected but the uploaded file is not protected.

How Media protect solves this problem

Once you’ve installed media protect files on protected content nodes are protected by default and you’ll get the public access menu item on the context menu of your media section.

Best of all you don’t need to modify any existing media or document type, it just works!

The public access menu item  is the same menu item you get when you want to protect a node in the content section.

When you select Public access you’ll get the same dialog as you get when protecting content. You can specify if you want to use single user or role based protection. You can also specify the login and not authorized page.

When you are finished protecting the media item, the media item gets a No Access sign. This indicates that the media is protected and can’t be accessed directly. When you open the media item and click on the document link you will be redirected to the login page since you are not logged in. Once you are logged in as a member and the member role is assigned as allowed roles to view the media item you can download the file.

Compatible with Media Pickers and default asp.net Membership provider

It’s nice that we can easily protect media items but we also want to make sure that the editor doesn’t accidently pick protected files using a Media Picker, or in the Rich Text Editor. Media Protect will also display the same No Access sign when you want to pick a media item using a media picker or via the Rich text editor. Not only the default Umbraco pickers but media protect is also compatible with some 3th party pickers, such as Multi Node Tree Picker (The awesome picker from UComponents) and the DIgibiz Advanced Media Picker. Best of all if you have a custom media picker you can add the alias of that media picker to the mediaprotect.config file and it will be picked up automatically.

Speaking about compatibility. Mediaprotect is based on the default ASP.Net Membership provider, so you can use the default asp.net controls for logging in etc. and you can also use your own  custom membership provider.  Media Protect comes with a small API you can use in a .Net usercontrol/XSLT or Razor script to determine if an item is protected, or to determine if the current logged in user has rights to access the media node.

Free alternatives

Media protect is a commercial package, it protects your media out of the box(no need to change any document or media type , it just works).It will cost you 99 euro per domain though. If you want to protect media without spending money you might want to check out these free alternatives

•  uSecureFiles
• Protected Media

More info and Download

If you want more info about Media protect I suggest you check out the product site. Here you find a video demonstrating the package and documentation. You can also download a fully functional free trial from our.umbraco.org. This will work on your local machine (localhost), only thing you get for free is a nice yellow sign that says you are running in Trial mode. The trial never expires and when you want to deploy your site you can buy a license for that domain or buy an enterprise license for your whole company.

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