Image/file browser for FieldFrame anyone?
Development and Programming
Hi,
I wish I was as qualified as some of the develpers on here on the forums and could boil together a visual file browser for file fields. I wish.
The nGen file filed is GREAT. And combined with the FF Matrix you have real magic!
But I don’t like selecting images from a dropdown list. Clients don’t bother renaming their image files to something meaningful so the dropdown is no good. I wan’t to try to modify the javascript to display something other than the dropdown - but my jQuery skills are extreamly poor.
Has anyone out there maybe already done this?
Best, Sammi
I am a professional Flash developer and I could easily create a file manager in flash. Maybe I should take that road?
Create an advanced flash file manager and then create a simple FieldFrame field that opens it. The user would then either select a file or upload a new one.
Best, Sammi
Hi Sammi,
I’d definitely say go for it with the Flash file up-loader. Would be great to see more options for file uploading in ExpressionEngine. If you were thinking of releasing this to the community also then that would be a major help to a lot of people I would think.
Best wishes,
Mark
Sambo- Im also a Flash developer- if you want I hand- I would love to help solve this. My users were just bitching about selecting images that have already been used. Word press does some brilliant stuff they learned from textpattern where images are stored in a media directory that shows where each post that uses an asset. I know 2.0 is going in that direction but waiting on 2.0… jeez
I think nGen’s work is a great place to start and we should see if nGen will let us extend the hard work they have already started.
Great.
Yes, modifying or extending nGen would possibly be the fastest way. Unless we could somehow bribe nGen to do the modifications 😉
There are two ways I am looking into now:
Simple thumbnail browser Just make a simple flash thumbnail browser (no upload or anything fancy) and modify nGen to display that browser instead of a dropdown list. This would require little work I think and satisfy most clients. If I was a jQuery guy I would probably just to the browser with jQuery.
Advanced File manager This would be more like the TinyMCE Image/File Managers but developed in Flash - because that is what I know. I want to go for this option but there are two things that bother me:
I have no idea how I could have an external PHP script access EE internals like Upload destinations, permissions and such. Possibly it would be fine just to skip all that and think of this script as totally standalone. Like TinyMCE Image Manager.
Security. I do not want to make a PHP upload script that can can be abused.
Best, Sammi
Consider this another vote for some type of image/file browser. I like the nGen file upload field quite a bit – it’s a default add-on on all EE sites that I develop – but I’d love to see its functionality expanded even further.