Images

MIsc
Experience in setting up Umbraco and my first website.

Chapters

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: Reasons for selecting Umbraco
• Chapter 3: Some references
• Chapter 4: Where to start
• Chapter 5: A digression – XSLT
• Chapter 6: Event Calendar
• Chapter 7: Do some design
• Chapter 8: Images
• Chapter 9: Rendering the output
• Chapter 10: Templates and CSS
• Chapter 11: Back to Media Pickers

Images

“And this, dear listeners, is where the story really starts!”

(If you recognise where this one comes from then you are too old for this game.)

One of my significant misgivings about Umbraco, in common with every other CMS I looked at, is around the facilities for image handling.

The first, underlying, design issue is that Images can exist as Media nodes in the database (media gallery) and thus available to XSLT code etc, or just be uploaded as files which sit in the filestore but have no other access mechanism.

This leads to fragmented upload and access mechanisms for the user. I have found the following so far:

• Upload into the Media Gallery, using the "Media" section, then set up a field using the Mediapicker datatype. Mediapicker is not easy to use however, since gives no preview of thumbnails.
• Use the new multiple media picker by Lefteris, at http://forum.umbraco.org/14785#post-14785. (Have not tried this yet). But it does not do uploads, so still need to upload separately in advance.
• Set up a field using the Upload datatype. However, this ends up with just a file and no database record, so is not accessible for subsequent reuse by a Picker. Confusingly, this also then needs different code in the template to insert the result into the page.

Further, one needs to know at design time whether the user wants to reuse an existing image or upload a new one before deciding whether to use an Upload datatype, or a Media Picker – in practice this is impossible.

• Use Kasper B's Multiple mediapicker, at http://kasperb.dk/2006/10/29/multiple-mediapicker-for-umbraco.aspx. This looks as if it might solve the above problems, except that it does not (currently) work on v3.
• Use the image function within the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. This allows either reuse of an existing image, or upload, plus a number of very useful formatting functions. It does however embed the image into a text field, and removes full control from the template code over how to render the image.
• For image upload and management the Umbraco offline utilities package at http://www.thoehler.com/en/projects/umbraco-utilitites.aspx, offers these facilities, plus other useful goodies. Again unfortunately this does not (yet) work on my installation.

In my opinion, the best solution could be to extract the TinyMCE code, and make it into a separate Datatype, so the users could do all the necessary functions using a single interface.

Package installation

Thomas Hoehler’s Utilities. This installs OK as per the instructions on the website, but there are a few points to note:

• Assuming you are running Umbraco v3, you don’t need the DLLs labelled [.NET] 1.1
• In the settings configuration screen you need to select “Umbraco v2 running .NET 2.0”, even though you are actually running Umbraco v3. Apparently the v3 option was intended to use a different set of web services, but these are inadequate and do not work.
• When using the Media option, it will only upload media items into a Folder, so you must first create a Folder using the Media function in Umbraco to give it somewhere to operate on.

Lefteris’s Multiple Media Picker. Again it installs OK according to the Readme.txt file included in the ZIP, but note the following:

• On Windows XP (at least) the DLL file defaults to the wrong set of permissions, and Umbraco won’t load at all as a result. Change the permissions on this file by going to Properties/Security/Advanced/Permissions and checking the box labelled “Inherit from parent …”
• AND do the same thing to extend the permissions of the ext-1.1 directory.