Symphony.

Thanks for your feedback, Makenosound.

Concerning #1: Do you find it hard to distinguish selected (blue) and unselected (white/grey) items or do you talk about seeing the Mediathek mode (opened/closed)?

Concerning #2: So you think it needs buttons for all actions, do you? My idea was to reduce clutter …

Concerning #3: I see two possible ways. There could either be an option to edit the drop templates (you can do this by editing the javascript at the moment). Or you could just use apply-templates to match the images of your output and add the image manipulation link there.

1: I think it’s just a little confusing that there are different modes. My feeling is that you should be able to see the selected items all the time or that it should be far more obvious that clicking “Edit” takes you to different set of information. It’s particularly confusing when there are only 2-3 items in the linked section.

Looking at it again, perhaps all that’s needed is a “Selected” tab alongside the “Edit” and “Create new”, that would make it very clear what’s going on and you wouldn’t have to change much else. Also I think part of the problem might be a bug—when you have all of the available items chosen they only highlight blue for a second before changing to white (making them look unselected). I’ll post that in the bug tracker.

2: My feeling is you do. Double-clicking is easy but it doesn’t seem obvious to me—people don’t expect web interfaces to have double-click action. Again, I think there’s some weirdness I’m getting is related to a bug when all the items are selected—for example going into “Edit” mode with all items selected means you can’t remove them without double-clicking (and doing so removes them from the list).

I think the way it’s setup in the Edit mode is fine, but I think in “Normal” mode it would be good to have a remove button instead of the double-click action.

3: I think both ways is good. Obviously you can do the second option you mention already, but I think for this to be a great tool for Authors—people are going to want to embed images/files randomly in their content—there needs to be a simple way to manipulate the drop template. I’m not sure what the best solution is for that. Something akin to WordPress’s (shudder) inline embed thing, but you know, not terrible.

Thanks, Makenosound. I’ll have to think about some UI changes that fit into the whole concept. If you have a mockup of how things could look like that would be a great inspiration.

To clarify things about the third point: Do you think of an inline editing feature while browsing entries or do you think of an additional field setting? I once had the idea to add an admin page where you can create custom drop templates which then should be selectable in the field settings. But I dropped the idea as it was getting quite complicated when thinking of auto discovering the current text-formatter of a droppable textarea and comparing template and text-formatter syntax.

Something akin to WordPress’s (shudder) inline embed thing, but you know, not terrible.

I’m not familiar with this - do you have a link? Or are you talking about a WordPress core feature?! I didn’t use WordPress for quite a while …

That’s a dump of the WordPress inline thingie. I think ideally you could set the basic fields and, in conjunction with JIT, set some sizing properties. As you say it’s a bit of a complex issue. For images ideally I would want to give Authors some options for sizes/resizing modes so they’re less likely to break things—your idea of selectable drop templates the Section definition are kind of where I was going.

Ah, I see …

When the user is dragging an item over a textarea a black “drop zone” is added which disappears on drop at the moment.:

Maybe this can be used as a stage for a form with custom image settings.

I think that’s quite a nice way to deal with where it should go. I’d say the only problem is that the textarea size will change sometimes and if it were only a few rows high that wouldn’t work so well. I guess you could simply resize it temporarily though.

I guess you could simply resize it temporarily though.

Yes, it could be handled the same way as the preview which resizes the whole Mediathek if it’s to small. I think I’ll chat with Jonas about his focal point extension and how this could be integrated with the drop feature as well.

I just pushed some changes to GitHub adding an optional auto discovery feature. If you change the settings in /assets/mediathek.js (line 27) to autodiscover: true the Mediathek will search all textareas for links to files and add matches to the list of selected items.

Grrrr! My Computer just turned itself off and deleted my nearly finished post. So I keep it shorter now.

At first thanks to Nils for the Mediathek and for pointing to my still unfinished image cropper extension.

The Mediathek has to modes, select and drag’n drop/textarea. The image cropper at the moment has to modes as well, upload field and textarea field. Those modes already work rudimentarily together.

The image cropper extension now stores its options in a field. There you choose the the field to which to apply the cropping functionality to and define other options. You can have multiple image cropper fields in a section to define option sets for your different needs. The image cropper field in the publish page serves just as a hook for the actual JS cropping magic.

Let’s look at the possibilities to combine both extensions. For the mage cropper upload field mode you need to have separate input fields to save the cropping coordinates. You just have to select those fields in the Included elements select box in your Mediathek field an you can use those values in your XML/XSLT magic. If the Mediathek would just use the same iframe technique from the Create new tab for the Edit tab (like in Makenosounds post) then the image cropper could easily provide the cropping of images.

The image cropper textarea mode adds a Edit/Insert link at the top of selected textareas. The link opens a modal dialog where the cropping happens. You can put together a set of images from different sources (plain input field for an URL, images already in the textarea,…) which you want to crop and the image cropper inserts modified image markup back to the textarea. I think it shoudn’t be too hard to hijack the modal window in the drag’n drop mode of the Mediathek. After dropping an image the modal window with the according image could be opend.

I’m full with client work at the moment, but I hope to be able to release something next weekend.

Edit- Just a Typo and the link to Makenosounds post.

To all beta testers:

There has been a stupid bug in the sort order logic: the entry array was saved globally overwriting other entries sort order each time an entry was saved. Please uninstall the Mediathek and replace it with the current code in the git repository.

I just finished updating Casa de Lewis which I use as a playground and installed Mediathek. Hmm… wicked cool. You are so not a historian!

Guys this extension should be part of the “core” extensions and included in the Symphony submodule.

FYI: The beta causes an error when trying to create Events. Posted on the tracker.

Here’s the fix.

If no one finds anything serious I think I’ll publish the Mediathek next week so that interface enhancements can be implemented later when the extension has been more in use and the drawbacks of the current implementation have become visible.

Question: Is one of you native speakers willing to contribute to a proper documentation of this extension? How to install it, how to use it, tips and tricks and things like that … Any help is appreciated!

This is a fantastic extension! I’d be happy to help out, Nils.

bauhouse, this would be great!

I’m not sure about a good structure of a documentation yet and if it should be part of the readme file or not. Any ideas?

People seemed to like the format of the Members extension documentation. Will something like this work?

I started to document in the readme using Markdown (here and here) but I wonder whether a separate documentation.markdown file might keep the README simpler.

Symphony extension developers seem to be really good establishing and following de facto standards for organising themselves. So if you come up with a successful way, others will follow :-)

So if you come up with a successful way, others will follow :-)

OK, so I wait.

(Have you seen Airport, with Tom Hanks?)