We are excited to announce the release of WP Offload Media 3.3! This release focuses on modernizing our codebase to support the latest server environments, expanding our global footprint with new storage regions, and refining the user experience with key stability improvements.

As WordPress and PHP continue to evolve, we are committed to ensuring WP Offload Media remains the most reliable solution for offloading your assets. Let’s dive into what’s new.

🚀 Embracing Modern Standards: PHP 8.1+ and WordPress 5.9+

To deliver the best performance and security, we have updated the minimum requirements for the plugin. Starting with version 3.3, WP Offload Media now requires PHP 8.1+ and WordPress 5.9+.

By raising these minimums, we can leverage more efficient code and ensure compatibility with the latest technologies. This release introduces full compatibility for PHP 8.4 and PHP 8.5, as well as support for WordPress 6.9.

Additionally, we have updated the underlying AWS PHP SDK to v3.360.1 along with other critical PHP and JS dependencies, ensuring your connection to Amazon S3 remains secure and robust.

🌍 Expanded Global Reach

For users targeting specific geographic audiences, latency matters. We have added support for several new selectable regions across our three major providers:

• Amazon S3: Asia Pacific (Taipei) and Asia Pacific (New Zealand).
• Google Cloud Storage: North America (Querétaro) and Europe (Stockholm).
• DigitalOcean Spaces: Atlanta (ATL1).

These additions allow you to store your media closer to your visitors in these regions, further improving load times.

And even if you use a CDN to provide faster media access to all your site visitors worldwide, being able to use a bucket nearer to your site’s server improves media offload performance.

💾 Improved Metadata Integrity

For those who frequently move media between the cloud and their local server, we’ve made an important improvement to data preservation. Previously, when an item was downloaded from the cloud back to the server, the file size attachment metadata value could be removed.

In version 3.3, this value is no longer removed during the download process, ensuring your attachment metadata remains complete and accurate regardless of where the file currently lives.

🛠️ Integrations and UI Fixes

We are always working to ensure WP Offload Media plays nicely with the rest of the WordPress ecosystem. This release fixes a specific conflict with Rank Math SEO, where deleting an item via the Media Library’s grid mode would fail. This functionality has been restored.

We also polished the user interface on the “Edit Media” page. Now, when you toggle the Public/Private access status of a file, the “Download File” link updates dynamically to reflect the change immediately, without requiring a page refresh.

🤩 And More…

• Robustness: We’ve added protection against invalid values being passed to the core the_post action, preventing potential crashes.

• Legacy Support: The legacy file size upgrade routine has been patched so it no longer throws errors if attachment metadata is missing.

For a full breakdown of changes, you can view the changelog.

Are you ready to update? As always, we recommend backing up your site before performing any major updates. Let us know what you think of the new changes in the comments below!