Help Wanted: TinyMCE Programmers for the Common Good

By lambert-1 on 8 Aug 2006 at 16:08 UTC

This is the web site in question: http://www.staterootsproject.org . We use Drupal (obviously) to bring networking technology to progressive politics, and we are using TinyMCE as our editor.

This is the biggest task before us for TinyMCE, and we really need someone knowledgeable in TinyMCE to do it:

There will be no onsite storage of media objects for users, whether vidoes or pictures.

Therefore, external sources will have to be used--Flickr for pictures, YouTube for videos, or their equivalents.

These external sources must be linked to while creating content using the fields from TinyMCE buttons on the toolbar; the Flash button, and the Image button.

However, creating links to such external source from content is not easy for non-technical users -- the process usually involves copying a chunk of data like a URL or a width from the site where the media object is stored, and then pasting the chunk into the correct TinyMCE field.

Ideally, there would be a plugin that, given a selected media object, would populate the appropriate fields automagically and then insert the right HTML markup where the cursor was placed. Maybe like this plugin, which is for TinyMCE but would need to be ported to Drupal from b2evolution (which fortunately is written in PHP).

Comments

If you post this as a

venkat-rk commented 8 August 2006 at 16:12

If you post this as a feature request in the TinyMCE module issues queue, contact the tinymce developers (their names are in the readme.txt or install.txt of the module) and/or offer a fee for this, you will probably get some results.

Thanks

lambert-1 commented 8 August 2006 at 18:20

We don't have a budget, unfortunately. But we are hopeful that the goals of the project are significant enough for people to want to help out.

The Embed Filter module

venkat-rk commented 10 August 2006 at 09:28

The Embed Filter module might be close to what you are looking for:
http://drupal.org/project/embedfilter

Do a search for FlickrStickr

zoon_unit commented 10 August 2006 at 17:11

This was an old module that has since mysteriously vanished, but it's still around if you google it. It allowed a Drupal user to automatically load picture links from an array of thumbnails from the user's Flickr account. You should be able to glean some valuable info from that.

I too, have a need to integrate picture and video links via TinyMCE from other serving sources, so I'll be interested to track your progress.

This seems like a universal need with a lot of websites. Videos and pictures can kill a site's bandwidth. By offloading that burden to outside vendors, you can keep your site under control.