One of major improvements touted in the Joomla! 3.3 release was the introduction of a cloud storage API. This feature was announced with much fanfare, saying that :
Cloud Storage APIs will allow Joomla! to interact with Amazon S3 and other cloud storage offerings like Dropbox, Google or Rackspace.
So, you’ve successfully updated to Joomla 3.3, and you’re looking around, trying to figure out where this feature may be found in your admin area. Where is it? The answer is very simple and perhaps a little anti-climactic, at least for now; there are no additional features in the back-end or front-end related with the Cloud Storage API. In short, this change is visible only in the core code of Joomla! where libraries for the most popular cloud storage solutions were added, just without any effect for your average, run-of-the-mill, regular Joomla! users. Right now (May 2014, reader from the future!) there are no dedicated plugins for version 3.3.0 of the CMS that take advantage of these new storage classes or utilize the cloud APIs for the media manager, assets and other places where this feature may be of use.
Only for developers?
This change is mainly dedicated to developers who can use the core Joomla! code to add support for cloud storage in 3rd-party extensions without the need to write additional code. Conceptually it is a great feature, but we need to wait until extension developers get to grips with this new code and use it to craft something useful for the average user. Such additions could prove incredibly useful, able to provide powerful options for using files directly from your cloud in external extensions without using the default Joomla Media Manager.
What kind of Cloud Storage may developers use?
In Cloud Storage Final Report we can discover that Rackspace, Google Cloud Storage and Amazon S3 were prepared for but not merged to the master CMS code. Earlier presentations about Joomla! 3.3 also mention Dropbox but there is no official list of supported APIs. Implemented methods can create and send Head, Get, Put, Post and Delete requests and process the server’s answers so all basic operations related with managing files are supported. For sure there are more interesting details in this Storage API implementation but after short look at Joomla! core code we were unable to find these classes…
In the Joomla! 3.3.0 Release Notes there is no information about this feature, nor any word related to Amazon, Dropbox or even cloud storage. The short notes regarding the release do mention the change from MooTools to jQuery and the introduction of Microdata, but there’s not even a mention in passing about the Cloud Storage API. It looks like this feature was planned to be introduced but eventually not added to the Joomla! 3.3.0 release. Why? That’s a pertinent question for which we don’t currently have the answer.