[development] inline files. last desparate attempt.

[Richard Archer]

At 3:32 PM +0100 6/12/05, Bèr Kessels wrote:

>I decided to leave core what is and add some nice features
>to inline.module.

Great! Inline is in need of some love and attention. I am
helping Matteo with maintenance of the inline module, and
there are a few enhancement patches in the queue already.


>* autoinline. One can now choose per node type, if attacements should go
>inline automatically:
>  ** in the teaser
>  ** in the body
>  ** in both,
>  ** not at all.

But where in the node? The user must place the image where they
want it and also have the ability to style that image.

Personally, I would always disable "autoinline" so that I could
have better control of the placement and content of the tag.


>* how small an image must be to show up inline. (dont show larger then
>400*500, for example)

A better solution for this would be to create a thumbnail.
But without that, yes a way to restrict the size of displayed
images could be useful. I wonder though if this isn't just
trying to save the user from themself?


>* For themes: I add an inline flag: $node->file[fid]->inline == TRUE for
>inline files.
>
>All of this has rather crude default settings, but can be very well themed.
>None of this changes the default filter tokens or their behaviour.

The current inline tag syntax needs to be updated. It is inflexible
and hard to extend. There is a patch in the inline issue tracker
that adds a lot of additional functionality to inline. This patch
will definitely be committed to inline in some form before 4.7.


>I have a few questions though:
>* Why does inline module not use the filter system, nodeapi(view) it uses now
>performs horrible! And previews do not show us the inline files.

There is a patch in the inline tracker that makes it a proper filter.


>* How could we enhance the UI for inline images? I personally prefer to add a
>hook_quicktags, to add a JS button in the quicktags bar for each attached
>file.

Some sort of button would be good. But the user will still need to
customise the inline tag so it shows up as they require.

Shouldn't the button be listed next to each image in the 'file
attachments' pane?

Would this interface add some way of editing the inline tag?
There needs to be at a minimum a way to specify:
- the class of the img tag
- the alt text for the img
- alignment
- height or width to scale the image.


>* How can we keep all this consistent? We should really re-think the
> ** logic to decide when an img must be inserted with an img tag (see above
>about settings)
> ** logic when to show a link and when to show nothing.
> ** how the tokens and the autoinline work together. e.g. should an image not
>be auto-inlined when a token for that image is inserted? Should we add a
>token autmatically rather then changing $node->body on nodeapi(view) ? and so
>on,

I think you have to insert the inline tag in the body in order to
allow the user to specify placement of the image/link.

Also remember that inline can be used to place links to non-images.

 ...R.