Q2A is, besides its excellent features for a question and answer site, as well a perfect platform for other website projects like image discussion sites, news sites, forum sites and much more.
For example does Q2A offer all features for a project like www.9gag.com or more or less all features for a site like www.pinterest.com , both being fast growing and well comented communities.
Q2A basically was developed to offer a perfect php/mysql question and answer script, so it does not wonder that image features for above mentioned projects are not fitting perfectly.
This discussion should figure out the needs of interested website developers as well as the best way to achieve the desired functionalities.
Using the wysiwyg (ckeditor with imageupload activated) q2a already offers image upload but there are a few problems when trying to use this feature for image based projects.
Problems:
a) Showing the questions content (images here) on question lists.
- There are several posts explaining how to do this by using the mouseover
plugin.
b) Uploading images through ckeditor is kind of difficult for targeted usergroups
who have low internet experience.
- There are posts which explain how to get an easier to use upload dialog, but it
is still not perfect.
c) Images are stored actually in the database, what is great as long as images are
not the main purpose of a webpage.
If each post uses images it could be better to store them in a folder on the
server, so the usage of CDN or multiple servers could be achieved easier,
the database wouldnt grow that fast.
- There is a post including the information that a plugin could be used to store
images in folders, but that plugin is still not written.
d) Resizing images server site. As consumer cams and cels do deliver actually
images of huge size and pixeldimensions, resizing images on serversite will hit
php limits on many shared hostings.
Resizing images through ckeditor is actually not possible, one can change the
css, but the image is still stored with its original size.
The authors of tinymce offer with www.plupload.com a free tool which allows
client side resizing, multiple image upload and more through either, flash,
silverlight, html5 and others.
It seems to be the most promising tool these days.
What could be the perfect solution ? What would fit best with the script ?
What I as non programmer imagine, would either be added features in the wysiwig editor:
- simple imageupload dialog, automatic max width / hight for images, auto resizing
clientside
or
- adding special fields to the ask, answer, comment form, with show/allow options
in adminmenu.
These special "media" fields could be shown or not on these forms, above or under the editorarea, and even the editor could be shown or not.
Mediafields could be image upload fields, movie (Youtube..) fields, sound, pdf, file or other fields.
Image upload fields should have the option in admin menu to set a max width / height, serversite or clientsite rezizing and may be more.
What are Your opinions ? What is possible ? Which way would be the most promising ? Would it be better to have plugins (if possible) or should modifications be added to the core ?
Please coment on that, please post Your needs and opinions !
Who could write a matching plugin, would it be free or what would it cost ?
