Nathan Wright wrote: > I think that John believes that assets should belong to a page rather > than > being more universal in nature, but I honestly think that this may > complicate things too much for the average user. > > In my system all assets are available to all pages. You add those assets > (be they images, pdfs, whatever) to your bucket (yes, I'm shamelessly > ripping off Mephisto's buckets), and then you simply click on them to > insert them into your page.
I agree with John and other's drive for simplicity in design and implementation. So there, the attach-an-image-to-a-page makes some sense -- but only as long as users only ever use a given asset once. The minute they want to reuse it, we've just made the user's life harder. The concept that an image is "owned" by page A and not page B is arbitrary (I can see them thinking that it is somehow "unfair" to page B and would probably just store the image with each page -- messing things up when they must update that image and kissing DRY goodbye. It also forces the user to use their memory instead of having the system keep that knowledge: "I need picture X -- I know I used it before. Let me see, where did I put that..." In my opinion, any good system should be able to tell you where (or if) assets are being used (in other words look at it from the asset perspective too). > The insert behavior is "smart". If you are inserting an image, it will > insert an image tag into the page. > If you try to insert a PDF, mp3, etc. into the page (or something else > that can't be directly viewed by the browser) the insert behavior will > stuck a link into the page instead. Like above, the precise form of this > link will depend on the filter that is applied to the page. > > In short, I think that inserting an asset into a page should be a simple > procedure ... the user shouldn't have to think about the markup required > to insert it. I like this approach too. In fact one of the concepts that I've been playing with is uniquely styling elements in certain pages -- rather than sticking every possible fringe case into my main CSS file. Similarly, I may create a dynamic page or two (say with an interactive maps) that needs some unique javascript. In these cases I build mini CSS or JS files that are, really just assets to me. These need that same "smart" behavior to include them in the page correctly. Of course, in this case, they are added to the head section (automatically). This is certainly beyond what most asset managers are attempting but the use cases are, really, identical with "insert an image", "figure out where this image is used" or "remove image from page." > Is this at all like what you're looking for? What are your ideas on the > matter? Sounds like you're heading in the right direction (IMHO, anyway). Feel free to contact me directly. Others are welcome too -- I'd like to consider all possibilities. I think that this is a much needed aspect to radiant (though maybe not something you'd ever put in the core). -Chris -- Posted via http://www.ruby-forum.com/. _______________________________________________ Radiant mailing list Post: Radiant@lists.radiantcms.org Search: http://radiantcms.org/mailing-list/search/ Site: http://lists.radiantcms.org/mailman/listinfo/radiant
