Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks for the detailed reply. Let me try to clear up a few things, because I think we are talking about slightly different use cases. The plugin is not trying to replace Cloudflare, Squid, Minio, or any other origin setup. It also is not an offloader. WordPress still stores the files and keeps whatever transformation pipeline you already use. The plugin only rewrites the final image URL so the request hits a Worker…
it was an afterthought, but doing something like rsync’ing the wp-uploads directory to a remote http folder might be the most accessible/easy way for a less technical audience. i think thats the first tack i took. but then just using wordpress itself as the origin server made the fetch and availability immediate. and then yeah if youre accomplishing that thing,and filling that gap in. that would be useful and i might…
The “in-between” space you mentioned is what I am trying to make simple: keep WordPress as the origin, avoid all the static-site complexity, and still get CDN-level delivery without touching DNS.
And yes, the instant on/off switch is a big part of the design. A lot of people have been burned by setups where Cloudflare goes down or an account gets flagged and suddenly the whole site is tied to that infrastructure. Being able to disable a plugin in wp-admin and immediately fall back to local files feels like the right safety valve for most WordPress users.
I appreciate you taking the time to think it through. If you try it, I would be interested to hear where it fits (or doesn’t fit) with the approaches you have used before.