Expanded Media Manager

I’ve done something similar (custiom TV with cropping ability)but not released it officially.
You can find it here if you’re interested to implement your own solution with alike functionalities.

hi,

thanks a lot, it looks very interesting, very close to what i’m thinking about ! i’m going to study you tv implementation line by line

this will help me play with cmp with a real example ! (so far, due to frenchy-frenchy clients, i’ve had to stay with Evo and, i must admit, i liked a lot the ability to add modules so easily, time to understand the same with Revo...)

thanks again and, of course, if ever i were able to do anything generic and interesting enough, i would share it here

Have swing

Quote from: virtualgadjo at Aug 21, 2010, 06:48 AM

mainly the other things i’m planning to do (well, actually, what i already do in my custom made admins)
- the ability to drag the cropping area
- the ability to add ratio, maxSize and minSize to this cropping area
- the ability to set the final size by hand in form text inputs, this allowing you to chose a cropped area that will be resized to your wanted final size

Would using the Aviary Image Editing API be helpful for this at all? (OR photoflexer api - http://fotoflexer.com/api.php OR picnik api - http://www.picnik.com/info/api OR pixlr api - http://www.pixlr.com/api ?)
http://aviary.com/blog/posts/announcing-our-api
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/aviary_releases_api_add_image_editing_to_your_webs.php
http://aviary.com/


I didn’t check the usage license for any of them, but Im sure commercial sites are probably NOT too kosher.

I was going to attempt to add one of those image editing APIs into a coupla personal blog sites with revo in the next few months.

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I was also kicking around ideas in my head that Modx revo could use a full blown, dedicated media manager. In my mind, while I was out running one day, I had a vision of the media manager being just an exact clone of revo that handles just media content. Same MVC app, style, and conventions as Revo has (with a document tree, furl’s, API, etc)-- but that only handles media type content creation, editing, and storage.

Basic file types handled would be popular - sound, video, & image types + pdf. But extendable to include to svg, and other vector types, plus any media type later on.

So instead of TinyMCE & FCKEditor, you would use a editor specific to each type of media -- likely a different one for each: .fla, .jpg, .gif, .mpeg, .pdf, .mp3, etc, etc.

After all, Modx is for creating/maintaining site’s textual content, why not a ModxMedia© version to create/maintain a site’s media files content?

hi,

well, i knew aviary and have had a try at those three others, they all are really impressive but have two drawbacks for most the real life site admins.

first, they are... too complete !! i’m not sure i’m willing to give so many image editing features to my clients
- most of our clients don’t want to be transformed into photoshop like users... the main reason why my clients love modx is that, opening the admin, they have their website page tree on the left, they click on a page and are able to do exactly what they want to do, edit the content. Coming to images, they usually just want to be able to crop it and resize it if necessary, being helped to do it the right way without having to choose what, how, why and so on.
- and i’m afraid those who would like this would be like beginners with a new toy... i’m not sure i even want to imagine the result

second, curiously enough, they are not enough... complete well coming to what i/my clients need.
a simple situation for example, imagine a gallery, you need two images
- the big one, with its original ratio but with max width and height not to be too big for the screen inside the modal box
- a thumb, but a squared one this time
then, when you client upload an image for this gallery, the first thing you do is to create on the fly the reized one (keeping or not the original one on the server)
This being done, time to crop the thumb, it needs to be a 100*100 squared img so
- either you give you client a form where they fill height = 100 width = 100 (that will automatically force ratio, set the cropper min height and width and resize the final chosen area to this size when clicking submit
- or you preset those values in the gallery admin page
of course, you also can imagine putting the cropped image on a ekta like background, having a form field for a copyright phrase that will, always automatically be written on a semi transparent cartouche and so on (i’ve already had far more complex situations to deal with, creating an reflect for two different page backgrounds on the fly for example)

all this would take several manipulations in those great image editor and you, well i am not sure our clients would be able (and willing...) to repeat them correctly exactly the same way to keep the look consistent...
MODx is great because it’s very easy to use for end users, i want to keep the same "spirit" when it comes to my modules/cmp and keep that smile on their face, saying wow it does all that on its own ! when my clients play with it

i would add a third little, well not that little actually, drawback, i’m not sure i’d like my website to depend on any other website... i ever i really needed that kind of full featured image tool i would ask a friend to develop it with AIR for me , i know, i’m cheating

actually, i’ve already written all those things i need and have used them many times in my tailor made site admins as it’s a really frequent situation in many websites for galleries or peculiar ratio images on top of pages, now, it’s just time for me to implement them the Revo way (in Evo, a simple module does the job and it take only a few minutes to implement it in the manager

anyway, thanks for the links, they are a few more for me to give those of my clients who would fancy play some more with images... and, when it comes to fees, pixlr for example is free to use and comes with a full and interesting API

Have swing