This is not (yet) so much a feature request, but more like a RFC: Is the following sensible and feasible or maybe just crazy talk ;-)?

I've been thinking about some additional types of assets that could be useful.

1. "Remote" assets:

Managing and filing miscellaneous files/assets that are not held in the local file system but on another server altogether. Asset Embed and Asset Youtube do something similar already, but it would be cool if something analogous and more generic could be implemented for any file type. I'm thinking of the possibility of creating an asset that is in essence just a link to file that could be hosted anywhere.

Inserting this assets via the wizard could result just in a download link, but it would be really cool if these "remote assets" could use formatters, too, i.e. a remote image could be inserted as an <img/>, probably with user defined dimensions. Or another use case: I've got a band website where from time to time I post some mp3 files. Now I'd like have these mp3s that are hosted on another server in one or more entries in my blog, and it would be great if I not only could use Asset to insert a link to the remote file, but even have 1pixelout display it via Asset.

2. "Text" assets:

Here I'm thinking of ready made text or HTML snippets that could be created and managed via Asset and put into different nodes through the Asset Wizard. If I change the text/HTML snippet in the Asset Wizard it would be automatically updated in all the node where into which it has been embedded.

Use case: I am managing a magazine website, and some online articles refer to articles in the printed magazine. So we'd sometimes like to add a box somewhere in the article body that has subscription information for the magazine. The text for this box is everywhere the same, but it might contain price information, a link to the subsription page or an image of the product. Now the price might change in the future, the link to the subsription page might change or we would like to change the cover image in all these boxes, which could be done by changing the text assets text centrally in the asset wizard and that would update the box in all nodes where it has been put.

One question is how input filtering would be handled with these assets. I think having an input format fieldset with the allowed input formats for the current user would be good, and Asset should use the selected input format when rendering the text asset.

What do you all think about these ideas? Would such asset types be doable and/or desirable?

Comments

wmostrey’s picture

wmostrey commented

I'll be sure to put in a longer comment, but just wanted to add this to the discussion: http://aaronwinborn.com/node/5.

ugerhard’s picture

ugerhard commented

I agree that hotlinking to somebody else's server (without permission!) should be discouraged! But there are a ton of legitimate cases where using a different file server for certain types of asset could be desirable.

wget-ing these files to save them locally (picking up on Aaron's post referenced above by Wim) seems counter-productive to me in these cases. Just think about hosted web server hard drive size limits etc. for example.

janwari’s picture

janwari commented

I understand the concern of using hotlinking to images, but as ugerhard pointed out there are legitimate uses of it too. For example: In cases where websites share a common image domain(i.e img.mysite.org) having the ability to upload images onto a remote server becomes very necessary.

Also in cases where one would like to use a CDN like www.internap.com, being able to upload assets onto a centralized remote server(i.e domain) makes synchronization much easier than having to synchronize content from multiple domains.

Hope some serious thought could be given to this functionality requirement :)

wmostrey’s picture

wmostrey commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)