Bad Design re Image Select Folder

Hi Guys, first off, FCKEditor rocks. And version 2.0 RC3 is class, well done! However I have a problem:

With the ColdFusion version (and I imagine all versions), I can only pass the path to the root folder I want to use for user files, wherein an "image" folder is automatically created for image selection and upload.

What if a user wants to choose another folder, say "images"? It seems to me that there is no way to do this. This is very limiting.

Or am I missing something?

At the moment, I am hacking fckeditor so that I can pass extra attributes "imageFilePath" and "imageURLPath". The idea is that if these 2 arguments (full paths) are passed, then the default behaviour of using "#APPLICATION.userFilesPath#" for all image paths will be ignored and these values used instead. Although I consider myself a very good programmer, making this improvement is proving difficult due to lack of documention and the compiled nature / exploded nature of the running version and source code provided respectively.

I think I need to get involved in this project to help make the improvements I need for my projects and to ensure that these improvements will be available to all users in future versions.

Phew... your suggestions / comments on how I should proceed would be gratefully received?

Wed, 03/09/2005 - 09:15

seilf

Joined: 09/03/2005

Posts: 1

RE: Bad Design re Image Select Folder

I was just working on the same adaptations (besides others) and i found it the easiest way to only adapt the connector.cfm. I erased all references to URL.Type in that file and constructed the folder name from a base stored in an application variable and then appended "call-place" and user specific information (subfolders) from session variables. This way you don't change anything on what you recieve or return from the editors core. But of course, if your apllication doesn't already use session variables for all kind of stuff you might not want to go that way.

Wed, 03/09/2005 - 11:16

topodian

Joined: 04/03/2005

Posts: 2

RE: Bad Design re Image Select Folder

I understand how your code works alright. Its just that if we are using the wysiwyg in a seperate application to manage content in a folder at a lower level (e.g. http://www.website.com/siteadmin ) then this design won't work.

Also we can't have two seperate images accssing images in completely different folders.

I got around these limitations by using my own image selection code and passing in the url and file path (encoded of course),

It would be nice if we could leave the code-as-it but allow to user to optionally override the default image folder by passing in a URL and FILE path to the images folder and then have the image browser code use them instead. What do you think?

Wed, 03/09/2005 - 12:04

hkramer

Joined: 09/03/2005

Posts: 10

RE: Bad Design re Image Select Folder

Hi,

i'm the developer of the coldfusion version and knows of the limitations of the "automatic subfolders" under the root directory. But this is the demand by the main author that should be used by all scripting languages (php/asp/perl/cfm). So feel free to tune the created subfolders and files to fit your needs.

But you should understand, that we must provide a minimum level for novice users that only extracted the files to their webroot and ... used directly the fckeditor.

The subfolder naming comes directly from the javascript (provided by URL.type) and the sub-subfolders by users choice. This is of course not the optimal solution for all users but ... hey all the code is free to be altered...

Fri, 03/11/2005 - 13:53

michaelmuller

Joined: 11/03/2005

Posts: 9

RE: Bad Design re Image Select Folder

Perhaps in a future version the main author will allow file types to be declared in a master list. At the moment there is too much code to change to get away from the 'Images','Files' etc paradigm.

On my sites I keep user/group files segregated by specific type, ie; /_files/#id#/jpg|gif|doc|pdf|etc determined by the file extension.

As shown in the example above I'd also hope that the author would allow for an inbetween folder to also be specified, to be determined by the user's stats, ie; userid or a group/conference id, etc. This could be taken from a url variable, perhaps URL.section or something. I mean, right now every person on the site that uses the editor shares the same single image folder. Not good for multi-user sites.

I've begun to delve into the code to try to accomplish these two capabilities but not being a JS maven it's a little difficult, so I'm giving up for now and just commenting out the Image toolbar button.