Symphony.

A question: Is it possible to link an image to more than one article?

Unfortunately not with the Section Link field in Symphony 2. You could however create a text input to accept a list of article IDs.

Alistair mentioned a good point:

Section links in this instance doesn't quite make sense from a user interface point of view. You don't really pick a list of articles and associate an image with it. Instead, you would have an image section that you upload multiple images. Then on your article, select the images you want associated with that article via a multi-select box.

Thanks.

Hi,

I have to admit I'm a bit confused how to deal with images too...

Say you wanted to implement a blog and embed images within posts (ie within a textarea field). With Symphony 1.7 the file upload would allow you to upload as may images as you want and you'd see the server path for each uploaded file. It was then an easy matter of copying the url to to the textarea and putting it within a <img> link.

With v2 the ways to approach this that I can think of are:

1) Use a file upload field as before except be limited to one upload (unless I'm missing something) 2) Use a section link as in the demo workspace. From a data model this seems to work but from a usability view not really... You have to create the entry without the images and then goto the entry list view. You then click on the images link, create a new image entry and take note of the url of the uploaded image. Then you have to go back to the article list, find your atricle, edit it and put in the <img> reference with the copied url. Phew ;) 3) Create a multi-select field that uses the list of images as a dynamic options. This works quite well except that there doesn't appear to then be an easy way of putting them into the entry body. Using this approach you could, of course, easily use xslt to put them in some standard location (ie all at the top or bottom of the post) but you can't really give the author an easy way to locate them in the post. 4) Write a customised front-end interface...

I'm probably missing something obvious but I've been playing around with the new version for several hours and can't figure out a way to do this. Is there a way? This seems a bit of show stopper for my intended uses so it would be great if there was a way around it...

Thanks Simon

From a data model this seems to work but from a usability view not really...

I think this is really a problem. There is no visible hint when editing an article that you can actually upload images. There is this small row in the article listing but I'm sure most of the end user will be confused about this - it's a approach for quite advanced users. (I'm struggling with it and I have been working with Symphony for quite a while)

When I think of people who have been working with Symphony sites I built, I see the need to have the images directly on the article edit screen and furthermore I think a small thumbnails of the images are needed. I remember questions like "Where my image now?", "This path is my image?", "Did I choose the right picture?".

My experience is that most end users need direct paths to get things working. This new approach is quite handy when you need to create meta data, but it is not easy to understand.

Maybe it could be useful to have some kind of Section Integration besides Section Link. I'm thinking of some kind of ajax/iframe integration of a section into another.

There's a complete API for field types, so extensions can add their own, there just currently aren't any such extensions. Someone could implement the multiple-upload widget from 1.7 as a field in 2.0, although it would be much better to make a field type more specifically tailored for image management. Same goes for the file manager.

Remember, you're just looking at the core system; the extra features you want can be provided by extensions, but we do not want to put that kind of highly specialised functionality into the core. Some of the ways Allen has implemented his "Spectrum" package are suboptimal, but this will really just be temporary while we work out the kinks and develop some extensions.

Remember, you're just looking at the core system

You are right. But this beta is like a children's birthday: you are always looking for more presents :)

I know you are working on the bug fixes, but is there a API documentation/description or a sample extension (doing more than the Markdown text formatter) yet?

I know you are working on the bug fixes, but is there a API documentation/description or a sample extension (doing more than the Markdown text formatter) yet?

After Revision 3 is out, and the number of bugs and issues coming in has settled down, I will be working on developing extensions to add back some of the functionality we took away from the core, language/translation related things and, finally, on the documentation for developers.

So, to answer your question, no. Not yet. ;)