Lesson request on content editor

Drozzy,

Would you please edit the wiki page for our Proposed Lesson Ideas and drop this suggestion in there? Thanks for your input!
[/Senpai]

You are right. This is an area in which Drupal is suffering. You will find a lot of people who complain about not having a perfect WYSIWYG editor for their pages, and this is largely due to the fact that it's difficult to add images to a post and have them stylized according to some predefined rules set by the web designer/developer.

At DrupalCampLA, we saw a presentation on a new module developed by the guys at achieveinternet.com called Asset Manager. http://drupal.org/project/am I think this module should get a lot of attention from the community. It's still in an early stage, so features can me added or even modified at this point to suit what the communities needs. I'm going to install this on my sandbox, play around with it and give some feedback. This module goes beyond image management, since it is a general asset management tool, but the discussions that are happening make me very hopeful that this module can be integrated into all the best image modules/tools (imagefield, imagecache, thickbox, etc.) so that when you are editing content, you can click the asset manager to browse through all your images or upload a new one and then insert it into your content, via some form of a token, that will theme the image according to established theming rules that have been set up for the site.

Anyway. I only got a short intro to it, so the best thing to do is to download it and check it out (not on a production server) and give your feedback about what you'd like to see it do, or even write a patch to make it do it.

Obviously for a lesson, we'd need established methods, but the other methods I've seen don't seem to be on the mark like this module. Perhaps the DrupalDojo community can help kick this module into the next level and get it ready for production.

Other than creating a virtual directory structure where IMCE creates an actual directory structure, how does Asset Manager compare to IMCE?

I've installed AM and while the interface looks nice, none of the images I've uploaded my newly created Image nodetype with an imagefield show up so I can't really compare these until I can figure out how to get AM working. I can see the advantage of having assets in the database in some situations, but I think IMCE solves the difficultly users have adding images to a post and have them stylized according to some predefined rules set by the web designer/developer.

What does AM do that IMCE doesn't?

Hi guys, I'll see if I can't explain a little bit how AM works and what the differences are to help the conversation, but first off, thank Mikey, I'm glad you liked it, and thanks for the post. :-)
The AM should be functional (if you notice specific issues, please let us know), but it's definitely still in rather early development so we're sorry if you run into any problems. The biggest difference between AM and IMCE is that AM is geared to be able to handle assets of any sort (and, in reality, basically nodes of any sort) while IMCE is geared only toward inserting image content. This is not to say that IMCE will not allow you to upload other content (it will), but it really only gives you meaningful display for image content. AM, meanwhile, is meant to be a one-stop shop for adding images, videos, audio, etc. In other words, IMCE provides limited support for content outside of images, but AM has been designed to provide support for any possible content types that you create.

The second major difference is architectural. We built AM to try and leverage as much of drupal's power as possible. To this end, we don't create non-node file types (i.e. all of the content uploaded creates a node so that it can be re-used later), we integrate with taxonomy to help facilitate search, and we utilize node page theming for preview support. The idea, to us, was to allow users to easily add things to images (like a byline or credit or year, etc) via CCK, making it easy to expand a piece of content to your heart's desire, find that content by filtering in taxonomy (using it basically like a folder structure), and preview that content the way it would appear on a standalone page (which by default make not be perfect, but gives you a simple way to theme the preview yourself [allowing you to create theming for things we couldn't even imagine]). IMCE gives you the ability to upload files as non-node entities which is good in some respects, but makes it difficult to modify the content associated with the files (if any). Searching is also useful on IMCE, but its filtering is limited and as the number of images grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to find exactly what you want (particularly if you say used images straight from a camera IMG_#### style).

The final major difference that I see is that IMCE is basically contained to the body of content. While this will probably cover most cases, we've run into the situation a number of times where we need a number of associated assets that don't lie straight in the body content but instead are appended at various dimensions and in various locations depending on context (i.e. listing pages, detail page, etc -- in other words we end up with multiple teaser images and 1 node detail page image). To solve this, we allow you to associate content not just into the body (which currently only has rudimentary TinyMCE support and nothing else...but more will come!), but also to associate content directly via a field (i.e. you add a cck field of type asset manager). What this means is that you can pull the content as you see fit and display it where/when appropriate at the size and in the context you want.

Does that answer all of the questions? I'll try and check back if there's anything else, but hopefully that makes it a little bit clearer.

Bill O'Connor + Lead Developer
Achieve Internet