Version 0.2

[Khaled Abou Alfa]

Striking while the iron is still hot. Here's the mini update I promised.
I've developed the media browser idea a little more. Basically I've
shown the uploading as a lightbox, rather than a separate form. We could
either include that on the page or we could have it as a proper popup.
What are people's thoughts?

Don't worry about the colours of the icons and the top bar, that's just
me having a little bit of fun, there's going to be no doubt a lot of
talk regarding the colours. These mockups are just to allow us to get
the basic structure agreed.

The real question is how much do we show in the media browser? Do we
should 1 months worth? All the files that are there?

Khaled

[Owen Winkler]

On 11/26/06, Khaled Abou Alfa <khaled....@gmail.com> wrote:
> The real question is how much do we show in the media browser? Do we
> should 1 months worth? All the files that are there?

I should tell a little story because I think it might be helpful in
explaining what I, myself, am after here.

I had a dedicated server for my site and was paying $120+ per month
for hosting essentially one site. At some point it occurred to me,
too, that this was utterly insane. So I bought myself a Textdrive
lifetime account and upgraded my Flickr membership to Pro. The
intention was that I would pay nothing more for hosting and host all
of my images at Flickr at a low yearly cost.

The problem is - just as it is with images stored locally - it is very
difficult to select photos that I want to use from Flickr and then add
them into my post's HTML.

You might remember WP.com's brief foray into Flickr embedding, which
is a result of my exploration, a cool feature killed inside of 24
hours by matt: http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=59368625&size=o

For WordPress I wanted to build an extensible architecture for
accessing files from disparate systems for browsing in the media
browser. This could be extended to external podcast hosting, like I
currently use with Hipcast, which supports MP3 and Flash video
playback.

If we built this idea into Habari, plugins could extend users' access
to media beyond the realm of their own servers. The media browser can
still be part of the post page. Actually, not too much would change
from the illustrations I've seen so far. It's the concept; the idea
of only showing certain files, or only uploading to a generic holding
place rather than picking somewhere specific, or that there's no
difference in uploading between different types of media or different
upload destinations.

I'm ok with the lightbox idea for uploads. I think I would prefer a
Gmail-like interface, where a file-upload box is present directly on
the page, and choosing a file automatically uploads it to the current
directory (via iframe, ajax, flash, or whatever). In addition,
selecting a file immediately generates another upload control that is
immediately available for uploading another file.

Uploads to different destinations (Flickr, Hipcast, or other hosted
services that user might already employ) might provide additional
controls specific to that destination. For example, a Flickr uploader
might include fields for tags and groups to apply to images uploaded
there.

Additional things that the media browser needs:
* Controls for inserting the media into the post
* A thumbnail preview (this could be toggled to save on loading time)

Thanks for the update, Khaled.

Owen