There's an ongoing problem with sites where the authors want to add or modify multimedia abilities. A number of existing examples appear to all have had the media data files uploaded manually and then suitably elaborate html tags included in the files that point to those manually uploaded data files. The specific code varies with each example - some are using small libraries of code, others more straightforward tags. So, maintaining the existing multimedia abilities is fragile, and there's no obvious way of implementing new ones. The CMS is clearly not designed to handle large media files, and I can find no documentation on a consistent practice outside the CMS.

Reviewed all this with JL and suggested that if he is willing to accept the risk of having the media data files uploaded manually and then pointed to from pages created through the CMS, we can continue to do that. His authors will create the web pages as usual and then email me with instructions on what media files are linked to from where in those pages.

This is a kludgy workaround and I'm concerned about it's long term viability. If any new sites are to be created, I think the CMS will have to be modified to formalize the process of linking to large media files (as it will presumably continue to be the case that putting huge media files into the db is not a good idea).