I want to think out loud here for a bit.... I have used extended properties quite a bit.. they are very common to magazine templates like my Kinetic template, Yellowled's Mimbo port, and many others.
Something common to many of these templates is assignment of things, such as images, to the entry via entry properties. By having the image placed in an extended property field, rather than the entry body, the template can precisely position the image in a consistent manner, like using a thumbnail in certain page views, and a larger version in another page view.
But I want to expand my interpretation of this... let's start by saying that these images are more than just a photograph.. let's call them "assets". So, at this moment in time, every entry has these possible assets: a small image (thumbnail) and a large image. But what if entries could have other assets, such as a slideshow, video, maybe an audio clip, pdf, etc.... Lets take that further. What if an entry could have multiple versions of the same TYPE of asset (3 audio clips and 2 video). And to make things really interesting, let's presume this entry's assets could be local (contained in our media library), or remote, such as a video hosted at YouTube or Vimeo.
With just 2 photos, extended properties makes perfect sense... add 2 custom entry property fields, and I'm done... any ONE of the other types is not too bad either, but it seems crazy to have a dozen different extended property fields that might never get used... plus, where do you stop? Do I need 1 audio field, or 10?
The best analogy I can think about is sending an email. When I send an email (I use MS Outlook), I can attach anything to it I want.. photos, worksheets, documents, audio, etc... and the quantity I attach to this email is unlimited.
I'm wondering, can we have some kind of "entry asset library" whereby an entry can have various things assigned to it, and then give users some way to interact with those assets (view photos, play audio, etc)??? Could it be dynamic, so that some entries could have nothing in their asset library, but other entries could have a dozen things of different types?????
Or am I just crazy again??!!
Extended Properties, or something else?
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Re: Extended Properties, or something else?
Hi!
Yeah, for this customized plugins are meant to be developed. Look at the podcast plugin, it supports parsing a custom entryproperty field to parse (I believe even multiple) videos and embed them to the article.
So one would need to create his own plugins to do things like these (or use the ability of templates to emulate event plugins *g*).
Of course the ideal way would be to have a plugin that acts as an asset container with some kind of drag+drop solution, it opens a popup to the media library and instead of showing the link, it will add some kind of "basket" in which it displays the dropped items.
That's quite an interesting thing to do, not even hard to code - but time consuming to put it all together...
Regards,
Garvin
Yeah, for this customized plugins are meant to be developed. Look at the podcast plugin, it supports parsing a custom entryproperty field to parse (I believe even multiple) videos and embed them to the article.
So one would need to create his own plugins to do things like these (or use the ability of templates to emulate event plugins *g*).
Of course the ideal way would be to have a plugin that acts as an asset container with some kind of drag+drop solution, it opens a popup to the media library and instead of showing the link, it will add some kind of "basket" in which it displays the dropped items.
That's quite an interesting thing to do, not even hard to code - but time consuming to put it all together...
Regards,
Garvin
# Garvin Hicking (s9y Developer)
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Re: Extended Properties, or something else?
Hi!
No, was I making the impression I would? I'm sorry, I'd be currently lacking time for such a task, but believe it would be a great project for any interested developer!
Best regards,
Garvin
No, was I making the impression I would? I'm sorry, I'd be currently lacking time for such a task, but believe it would be a great project for any interested developer!
Best regards,
Garvin
# Garvin Hicking (s9y Developer)
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Re: Extended Properties, or something else?
No - you did not give that impression... I was just teasing. Anyone else have the time?garvinhicking wrote:Hi!
No, was I making the impression I would? I'm sorry, I'd be currently lacking time for such a task, but believe it would be a great project for any interested developer!
Best regards,
Garvin
=Don=
Re: Extended Properties, or something else?
I'd have the time next month, but I don't see a way to achieve the goal. I never use the extended properties, so a universal basket for media-files would be a very interesting thing for me.
sincerely
sincerely
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Re: Extended Properties, or something else?
Hi onli!
Does that make sense?
Regards,
Garvin
I'd imagine a drag+drop area, where serendipity opens the media selector screen (through the same link like the buttons have) and use a custom textarea. The media selector allows to pass a custom javascript callback that could be executed after a new image has been added, so some javascript code could convert a hidden textarea to transform that into a container with multiple ids, that it serializes to a string, and when displaying an entry with a container that has a serialized string, unserialize it and display the attachments...?onli wrote:I'd have the time next month, but I don't see a way to achieve the goal. I never use the extended properties, so a universal basket for media-files would be a very interesting thing for me.
sincerely
Does that make sense?
Regards,
Garvin
# Garvin Hicking (s9y Developer)
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