What's New in 1.5.0

WPMediaVerse 1.5.0 closes two privacy and access bugs around non-public media, heals video posters that were stored with the wrong path before this version, and unifies the upload-and-serve pipeline so the underlying bug pattern cannot recur. There are no new customer-facing features; this is a correctness and robustness release.

Included in Free. Every item on this page applies to the free version. Pro picks up these fixes automatically because Pro builds on top of free — Pro 1.5.0 itself ships no code changes, it is a lockstep version bump. Install both updates together when running Pro.

Non-public uploads render their own thumbnails

Members, Friends, Only Me, Group, and Custom-access media no longer return a 403 for their own thumbnails after upload. The owner, and any viewer who has been granted access, now sees the thumbnail correctly — on local storage and on every cloud driver (BunnyCDN, S3, R2, Spaces).

Private uploads leave zero public footprint

Private media is now fully invisible to everyone except its owner:

• No BuddyPress activity entry is created for a private upload.
• The profile activity tab no longer surfaces broken thumbnail cards for private items.
• The profile media tab badge no longer counts private items when someone else is viewing.
• The Explore grid stays clean of private media.

Other non-public levels (Members, Friends, Group, Custom) keep their normal audience-discovery behavior — this change is specifically about media marked Private.

Legacy video posters heal automatically

Videos and audio uploaded before 1.5.0 could store a poster path pointing at the wrong subdirectory, which showed up as a broken still frame on cards, in the lightbox, and in feed previews. Database migration v15 runs once on the first page load after updating and re-derives the correct poster path from the on-disk file location. It is idempotent and safe to let run.

For cloud-storage sites, the migration is cloud-aware: it respects CDN-authoritative paths so existing cloud video posters keep resolving. If a poster still looks broken after the update, run wp mvs cloud-thumbs-backfill to push any local-only poster variants to the active cloud driver.

One unified read path for media URLs

Theme overrides and shortcode users can now call the same Core\MediaUrl helper that the plugin's own templates use, so custom integrations no longer have to know anything about the signed-URL plumbing. See Template Overrides for how to use it from a theme.

One unified upload pipeline

Image variants, video posters, audio cover art, and WebP/AVIF siblings now all flow through a single writer, so the file layout is identical for every media type. WebP and AVIF generation in particular was collapsed into one shared publisher, removing a duplicate-write footgun where the two paths could disagree about the destination directory. Adding a new output format in the future is now one extension point instead of five.

Shorter-lived thumbnail links, now filterable

Thumbnails embedded in long-lived surfaces (notification emails, RSS) are minted with a one-hour access TTL. Sites that cache those surfaces at the CDN for longer can widen the window with the new mvs_broadcast_thumbnail_ttl filter.

Under the hood

The upload and read pipeline is now backed by five focused services — MediaUrl, VariantSpec, StorageRouter, MediaVariantWriter, and PosterService. Existing methods are kept as shims for at least two releases per the deprecation policy, so custom code calling the old paths keeps working.

Upgrade notes

• Update Free to 1.5.0 first, then Pro to 1.5.0 if you run it.
• Migrator v15 runs automatically on the first request after the update. No manual action is needed.
• Cloud-storage sites with pre-1.5.0 video uploads: if any poster still appears broken after the update, run wp mvs cloud-thumbs-backfill.