Forum OpenACS Development: Re: Associating photos with blog entries (or generically stuff with stuff)

A client recently pointed me to a forum system that has something like our rich text widget to support including an image that is hosted somewhere else.

http://pub106.ezboard.com/fthekittenthewitchesandthebadwardrobe36671frm24

This is another possiblity for quick hack and could support use with photo book or with images hosted elsewhere.

If you are inside dotLRN there is the attachment functionality hooked up to forums. Though it maybe an example of how *not* to do it, I haven't looked at it recently.

The code in /contrib/packages/simulation/citybuild/object-edit uses cr rels to embed images in marked up text. In this case, the text is the content of a "sim_prop" or "sim_location" or "sim_character". An object can have up to 10 images associated with it (this arbitrary limit is set in the data model, like this:
select content_type__create_type(
    'sim_location',                -- content_type
    'content_revision',            -- supertype
    'Location',                    -- pretty_name,
    'Locations',                   -- pretty_plural
    'sim_locations',               -- table_name
    'location_id',                 -- id_column
    null                           -- name_method
);

select content_type__register_relation_type (
    'sim_location',                -- content_type
    'image',                       -- target_type
    'image',                       -- relation_tag
    0,                             -- min_n
    10                             -- max_n
);

When you select an image from the dropdown (which shows all cr_items with type 'image'; type is set when it is uploaded, in this case using the same object-edit form but with image instead of location selected), you get an xml snippet that can be pasted into the body context of the sim_location. Whenever the sim_location is rendered, this xml snippet is converted to <img src="etc etc etc">.

You can install simulation on a HEAD server, go to citybuild, and try it yourself, or ping me for a login on a stable test server.

If this is going in the right direction for you, let me know and I can explain in more detail.

It's on my long list of things I want to do ...

The nicest solution would be to:

1) migrate blogger to use CR

2) use cr_item_rels and the <relation> tag as mentioned by Dave and Joel.

Any volunteers for this?

I'm contemplating thinking about moving pinds.com to a 5.1 platform, and this is one of the features I really want in my new site. And being able to actually use it on a daily basis is a strong motivator for adding features. However, the process of moving data to the new platform is going to be fairly painful ... :(

/Lars