module FieldtypeImageFromPage pick an image from various sources

[bernhard]

Hi @gebeer

just tested it and everything works great. Great work!

Not sure if the edit link icon is the best solution regarding UI/UX. If a user wants to upload an image I'm not sure if the pencil on the right was the first they were looking for?!

Besides that I have to say that I really like your module ? 

Two more things:

1) What do you think of using pw-panels instead of the modal? I really prefer panels over modals. It's very easy to use and you can easily test it on your own:

1) replace pw-modal class by pw-panel on your link
2) execute pwPanels.init(); in devtools console
3) click your edit link and it will open in a panel

Only the ajax reload would have to be triggered on panel close instead of modal close. Maybe you could even make that configurable in your module ? 

2) Would would be REALLY great would be an inputfield that can also store custom images on that page. Take a news section as an example (I have this usecase on several projects): The user wants to show a featured image for a news item... Currently my setup is that he has to upload it for every news item. The problem is, that he uses the very same image several times across several news items. Your module would make it possible that he uploads it only once. So far so great ? 

But what if he wanted to upload an image that is for sure only used on that very single news entry (eg an image of an event). Using your field he'd have to upload that image on the shared folder and it would "bloat" up the shared folder. It would be absolutely awesome if he was able to choose either a picture of the shared folder or a custom upload that is saved for that single page only.

Technically this should not be a huge problem as the shared images have their own page to live and the custom image could be saved in the folder of the currently edited page.

Thx ? 

[adrian]

Just a random thought - in addition to using child pages for categorizing images, I wonder if some users may prefer image tags? Perhaps you could group images for selection by the tags they have been assigned on their page. 

Really just thinking out loud, so please don't consider this a feature request unless you think it's a good idea - I haven't thought it through ?

[gebeer]

11 hours ago, bernhard said:

Not sure, but is this what you are looking for? https://processwire.com/api/ref/inputfield/wrap-attr/

I saw that one. It would add an attribute to the wrapping inputfield which in my case is InputfieldWrapper which does not allow attributes. I'd need them on the InputfieldMarkup fields which inherit InputfieldWrapper. So no way. Anyways I found a workaround and attached my attribute in my markup.

 

[gebeer]

10 hours ago, bernhard said:

Not sure if the edit link icon is the best solution regarding UI/UX. If a user wants to upload an image I'm not sure if the pencil on the right was the first they were looking for?!

Happy to receive suggestions with visuals ?

3 hours ago, adrian said:

I wonder if some users may prefer image tags

Thanks for the idea. In my experience users hardly ever use image tags. They'd be a good way to categorize thumbnails, though. Will think about some more how to best implement this. Maybe automatically categorize if tags are there. Don't want to offer another option for this to avoid clutter in the field settings.

10 hours ago, bernhard said:

I really prefer panels over modals

You sure do love panels ?

10 hours ago, bernhard said:

Besides that I have to say that I really like your module

Thank you!

10 hours ago, bernhard said:

What do you think of using pw-panels instead of the modal?

I thought about this option. 2 things that kept me from using panels: First, they don't offer hooking into close events easily  out of the box like pw-modal. Second, in my opinion for this use case it is cleaner to have an overlay over the whole page. It is more distraction-free. But thank you for taking the time and demonstrating!

11 hours ago, bernhard said:

Technically this should not be a huge problem as the shared images have their own page to live and the custom image could be saved in the folder of the currently edited page.

Interesting thought. I'd say for those cases also offer a normal image field and then in your template render only the one that has content. What you describe sounds like a hybrid between normal image field and my fieldtype. Actually I am thinking a lot about how to best present the input for my fieldtype. And I'd love to use the standard image input from PW. Basically make my inputfield extend InputfieldImage or InputfieldFile and modify according to the needs. Only had a quick look and it involves quite a lot of changes to the original classes. It is on my personal wishlist and I will fiddle with it and see if I can produce something that makes sense and is usable without being confusing.

[gebeer]

@bernhard This better?

[gmclelland]

..Love what you are doing with this module.  Thanks for making it.

The icon's line weight look too thin in my humble opinion.  What about using an icon from the included font-awesome library.  You can browse the icons included by editing a template and then go to "Advanced" tab.  Then scroll down to the Icon inputfield and click "Show all icons."  That might give you some ideas?

For an upload icon, maybe fa-upload?

For an edit icon, maybe fa-pencil?

[gebeer]

3 minutes ago, gmclelland said:

.Love what you are doing with this module.  Thanks for making it.

Thank you for taking your time!

5 minutes ago, gmclelland said:

What about using an icon from the included font-awesome library

I am using UIkit icons to be consistent with the UIkit admin theme. But I could switch to fa icons for users that still have the default theme enabled.

This is what it would look like with fa-upload

[adrian]

@gebeer - I recently recommended this module to @eydun as he was looking for a media manager tool. He asked me about using it in @Macrura's awesome Settings Factory module. I had a quick play around with it but got some errors. Then I tried your FieldtypeImagePicker module and it actually works quite well. I am wondering whether: a) you are planning on maintaining this other module, and b) if you think it might be possible to make FieldtypeImageFromPage work with Settings Factory as well - I fear the need for storing multiple values might be the problem. I guess the data could be converted to json, but that complicates things for you and probably isn't worth it, but just wanted to start the discussion because I know that having an image field in Settings Factory is something many users have requested.

[gebeer]

56 minutes ago, adrian said:

Then I tried your FieldtypeImagePicker module and it actually works quite well. I am wondering whether: a) you are planning on maintaining this other module

Yes, I will maintain that one, too. But don't think I will add any more features in near future. I think it is quite stable and can go in the modules directory.

57 minutes ago, adrian said:

if you think it might be possible to make FieldtypeImageFromPage work with Settings Factory as well

I'd have to look at Settings Factory first. It's new to me. Will let you know.

58 minutes ago, adrian said:

I fear the need for storing multiple values might be the problem. I guess the data could be converted to json

Originally I was storing as json {"pageid": 1234, "filename": "filename.png"}. But then I realised that searching for filenames via API would be harder to implement. So I refactored to use 2 separate fields in the DB.
BUT the issue for storing multiple files will come up when I decide to support picking multiple files. Then JSON would be the way to go, I guess (but not sure).

[bernhard]

6 hours ago, gebeer said:

Happy to receive suggestions with visuals ?

I'm not an UI/UX expert either ? Maybe something like this (elements beside the main image smaller, icon in the shared images inputfield larger):

6 hours ago, gebeer said:

But I could switch to fa icons for users that still have the default theme enabled.

That has nothing to do with the theme used. Fontawesome icons are included in all admin themes. It's just the old 4.7 version: https://fontawesome.com/v4.7.0/icons/

[gebeer]

3 minutes ago, bernhard said:

Maybe something like this (elements beside the main image smaller, icon in the shared images inputfield larger):

Thank you very much for taking your time and putting this visual together! I don't really want to have icons next to the preview image because in future I might support selection of multiple images. Larger icon near the thumbnails might be a good solution.
Also please understand, that I do not want to make this a hybrid between native image fieldtype and my fieldtype. The fieldtype now advertises that you can pick an image from another page. If it would also allow to upload to the page it lives on, it might become confusing to the user.

6 minutes ago, bernhard said:

That has nothing to do with the theme used

If you want to stay consistent with the UI, it has ? To me it looks odd having icons from different libraries on one page or even across pages. As long as there is an icon available for the framework I am using, I always prefer that one over an alien one.

[bernhard]

11 minutes ago, gebeer said:

I don't really want to have icons next to the preview image because in future I might support selection of multiple images.

Makes sense!

12 minutes ago, gebeer said:

Also please understand, that I do not want to make this a hybrid between native image fieldtype and my fieldtype. The fieldtype now advertises that you can pick an image from another page. If it would also allow to upload to the page it lives on, it might become confusing to the user.

I don't think it would be confusing, but I understand that you don't want to support this. It was just an idea ? 

12 minutes ago, gebeer said:

If you want to stay consistent with the UI, it has ? To me it looks odd having icons from different libraries on one page or even across pages. As long as there is an icon available for the framework I am using, I always prefer that one over an alien one.

Yeah, but at the moment the alien is the uikit icon, because all other icons in the pw admin come from the fontawesome library ? 

[gebeer]

9 minutes ago, bernhard said:

Yeah, but at the moment the alien is the uikit icon, because all other icons in the pw admin come from the fontawesome library

I'm an idiot ?

[adrian]

16 hours ago, gebeer said:

Yes, I will maintain that one, too. But don't think I will add any more features in near future. I think it is quite stable and can go in the modules directory.

I guess I was thinking that you could combine both modules - just because the interface elements are so similar and thought it might be less maintenance for you. If a directory path is supplied in the field settings, then the images from that path could be added to a image selection section above or below the collapsed page sections. If none is specified, then only the pages would be shown. Similarly, it could be path only if no page / image field is specified in the field settings.

[adrian]

Another thought for you - what about the option to select an image from an images field on the current page? I know sometimes I ask users to sort images so that the featured image they want is the first one in the list, or get them to tag an image with "featured", or some other approach. Being able to select an image from the current page with this field would be an awesome way of handling this.

[gebeer]

2 hours ago, adrian said:

Another thought for you - what about the option to select an image from an images field on the current page? I know sometimes I ask users to sort images so that the featured image they want is the first one in the list, or get them to tag an image with "featured", or some other approach. Being able to select an image from the current page with this field would be an awesome way of handling this.

The use case you are describing does come up quite often. But I think this is going beyond the scope of this module. It advertises that you can pick images from predefined pages. And I don't really want to break out from that logic atm. But I'll put it on the wish list and see if I will add it as feature in a later version.

[adrian]

5 minutes ago, gebeer said:

But I think this is going beyond the scope of this module

I guess that's why I was thinking if the module was simply named "ImagePicker" - then it could allow picking from disk path, pre-defined pages, or the current page - would that model / approach make sense?

[gebeer]

11 minutes ago, adrian said:

I guess that's why I was thinking if the module was simply named "ImagePicker" - then it could allow picking from disk path, pre-defined pages, or the current page - would that model / approach make sense?

Makes sense. Only concern I have is that the field configuration options will grow to an extent which might overwhelm the user. This is why I had decided to make this a standalone fieldtype and leave the ImagePicker for picking from folders. I will contemplate some more and maybe combine the two.

[bernhard]

9 hours ago, adrian said:

Another thought for you - what about the option to select an image from an images field on the current page? I know sometimes I ask users to sort images so that the featured image they want is the first one in the list, or get them to tag an image with "featured", or some other approach. Being able to select an image from the current page with this field would be an awesome way of handling this.

This could also solve my request of adding images directly to that page ? 

[szabesz]

17 hours ago, adrian said:

I guess that's why I was thinking if the module was simply named "ImagePicker" - then it could allow picking from disk path, pre-defined pages, or the current page - would that model / approach make sense?

+1

As for the config being confusing / overwhelming, it could be solved via step-by-step guides in the readme file, especially if it has screenshots to showcase all three setups.

Edited December 12, 2019 by szabesz
missing word added :)

[eydun]

Hello @gebeer

Great work, and thank you for two much needed modules!

I second the idea to merge both modules into one killer-module, if it is possible?
(the name ImagePicker would be a good and suitable name for the combined module).

But this is of course for you to decide ?

[gebeer]

After giving it some more thought, I decided to merge the 2 modules and call the resulting ImagePicker. One thing I'm not sure yet how to best approach it:
1. should the options for choosing images from pages/folder/current page be exclusive, so that only 1 option can be set per field? Or
2. should it be possible to choose all 3

I guess, 2 makes more sense. The challenge will be to make the UI/UX of the inputfield lean, clear and easy to deal with. Instead of having the thumbnails underneath the preview image, I think with that many possible sources for images, it will be better to present them in a modal window.

[adrian]

I think "2" for sure.

I think the thumbnails should be as you currently have them when there is more than one page with available images - in collapsed inputfields - one for a defined filepath, one for the current page, and one for each of the other available pages - which of these are shown of course will depend on the field's settings.

[gebeer]

@adrian @eydun 

Made some progress and have a working version that is compatible with @Macrura's Settings Factory module. I switched to handling my field value as json. Haven't published the version yet as I'm planning on incorporating it into the yet to be developed new ImagePicker module. If you want to have a peek, I can publish it to a separate branch on github. Just let me know.

First I was in doubt about using json for the field runtime value and for storage. But now I'm confident that this is the way I will go with the new ImagePicker module. So that one will be compatible with Settings Factory.

The next days I will be working on combining this module and my ImagePicker (pick from folder) into one with the additional feature of letting the user choose an image from the page this field liveson. The resulting module will be released under the name ImagePicker. Hope I can get it out before Xmas. 

[bernhard]

That sounds great, thx @gebeer