Symphony.

Nils, this all sounds very good. I’d like to contribute, but the last time I offered, in addition to other time-consuming, work-related things, I was granted the opportunity to prepare the Forum Ensemble for release. I would very much like to see as many improvements as possible in the area of asset management with Symphony. And thank you for all your work on this so far. Perhaps I can make some contributions in the interface design area. To be honest, I need time to experiment with what you’ve already developed before I can comment.

1. Yeah, I think “select” is the more appropriate term.
2. Not sure about this. Could be useful in some cases, but I can also imagine a scenario in which you actually don’t want editors of one section being able to change content in another section. If you do this I’d suggest making it optional, but I’m sure you were planning that anyway…
3. Ditto above.
4. Maybe using a term like “manage” instead of “select” helps give the impression that there are other functions?
5. I might not use it but I bet many would ;)
6. I don’t really know. My preference is always to keep things granular, so I’m not all that interested in the idea of uploading multiple images to the same mediathek item rather than just creating multiple mediathek items…
7. Would love to help out with the development, mostly because I’d probably learn a lot, but I’m not sure what I could contribute since my coding skills aren’t all that strong…

4. Maybe using a term like “manage” instead of “select” helps give the impression that there are other functions?

Well, reordering is only available if you are not on the edit/select tab. Complicated, isn’t it …

6. I don’t really know. My preference is always to keep things granular, so I’m not all that interested in the idea of uploading multiple images to the same mediathek item rather than just creating multiple mediathek items…

Maybe I couldn’t make this clear enough: I think linking multiple files to a single Mediathek item should not be a feature of the extension. The only idea I’m thinking of is creating multiple Mediathek items automatically based on a list of selected files (some kind of batch import).

7. Would love to help out with the development, mostly because I’d probably learn a lot, but I’m not sure what I could contribute since my coding skills aren’t all that strong…

You do remember what my profession is, do you?
So anybody is welcome to help :o)

You do remember what my profession is, do you?

Yes, but I’m trained as an anthropologist, which makes me especially ill-prepared for practical endeavors ;)

1. Yes and I think it should be “Select” instead of “Edit”.
2. Me personally? No. I’m usually very careful about my entries. Clients that I make my sites for, on the other hand, are not. The ability to manage everything via one interface is paramount.
3. An Edit/Preview mode would be good. You could have people click to preview the entry and from there, if necessary, edit it.
4. I don’t because I figure out the order before I upload. However, I don’t believe my clients are that organized. It’s not a necessity but it is convenient.
5. I can definitely see the benefit of it, yes. Again, I properly crop and size my images as I choose before I upload them but, as always, clients might not be so well organized. If you went this road the ability for me to pre-define the crop size and have it be automatic in cases would also be extremely useful (allowing them to move a pre-sized box, for example).
6. More what I’m interested in is for things were I’m uploading video and I want a poster or slide to be automatically associated with it. So, for example, when uploading I’d have one main image and then another upload that would be the corresponding video.

If you need some help figuring out a workflow I’d definitely be willing to help. I use this plugin on every site I build so it’s important to me that it’s the bet it can be.

One thing you didn’t mention that might be useful is adding thumbnails to the listed entries. I know I label all mine very specifically but not everyone does. This would save them from having to open the preview field every time to check what a specific image is. Often a thumbnail would be all that’s needed and it wouldn’t have to be very big, 40px or so.

1. Vote 1 for “Select”

2. Would be nice. I find a lot of clients struggle with the concept of entries as distinct objects—as douboftheabaci notes—having everything in the same screen would make things far clearer.

3. Makes sense to me.

4. I haven’t had enough experience using it to really comment, though I think it could be more explicit—perhaps you could simply add a note saying “Drag to reorder” or something.

   1. Hells. Yes. This would be great.

   2. Doesn’t worry me too much. I imagine it’d be great to have at some point though for populating entries with large sets of media.

Thanks for feedback so far.

One thing you didn’t mention that might be useful is adding thumbnails to the listed entries.

This is possible with the current version. Just enter something like this into your caption:

<img src="/image/your/custom/jit/$image" width="123" height="123" /> $title

($image should be an upload field and $title an input field)

I forgot another thing:

8. Image grid view

Introducing a new display mode that does not use captions and the table like style for the Mediathek but an Finder/Explorer like grid of image thumbnails.

Question: Do you need something like this?

Question: Do you need something like this?

I need it!

<img src="/image/your/custom/jit/$image" width="123" height="123" /> $title

In this case would be nice to use the $root parameter also.

That would be awesome!

Maybe an idea like an image grid view for the Mediathek could be extended to also suit the publish overview of a section (/symphony/publish/). It could be quite useful if you are browsing an asset section inside and outside the Mediathek.

I really like that idea. I didn’t realize the caption area already allowed for thumbnails, which is great! But if you could view several images at a time, that would greatly enhance the ability to quickly browse through pages of images. Then you’d probably want to be able to set preferences for thumbnail size and number of thumbnails per page, since the default number of entries per page would not be sufficient.

It’s probably a good reason to take the entries per page preference out of the configuration settings and have them set by the individual Sections.

One more in support of a grid view for Mediathek.

1. yeah changing the name makes more sense
2. I like the idea of being able to edit it. Not so sure I’d use it very often, but it’s nice to know you could.
3. again it would be great to have
4. Didn’t realize you could do that. I could see if you have a client that would want that feature.
5. Again that’s a great feature to have within the preview mode.
6. I think I’ve stated before, this is something that I’ve asked for on the board and come up numerous times from others. It would be extremely convenient to do it with Mediathek, since it’s becoming the defacto media manager for symphony.
7. I’ll gladly help test it out
8. A grid view would be excellent, much easier then looking at a list of words, especially if the image that was imported didn’t have an easy to read name.

As it gets a bit confusing with all these lists here I set up a poll for the Mediathek 2.1 features described in this thread: http://spreadsheets.google.com.

It would be great if those who posted here could vote again and if those who have been silent until now could add their votes, too.

If you like to help developing new features for this extension (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP), please contact me via email (see here). Some people here say Mediathek might become the standard media manager but currently the extension only contains features I needed myself. Programing is not my profession and I have a lot to do at my day job over the coming months - if you have ideas, code snippets or interface scribbles you are warmly welcome to join Mediathek’s one man development team!

The plugin extension seems to fail completely in IE7. The only thing visible in the page is the label. Are there any plans to support IE7/8 in the future?

Well, there have been no plans to not support it currently - it should work, so this is a bug.

Reported as a bug on github.

Fazal, just did a quick test and it works in IE 8 - not sure why IE 7 is failing.

Does anybody know a good tool to debug JavaScript in IE?

Fixed Nils.

IE7 is very particular about trailing ‘,’ in object definitions.

So

Line 31,39 of mediasection.js remove the ‘,’ from opacity: 0.01,

and

Line 154 of mediathek.js remove ‘,’ from SEARCH: 'type and search',