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by Patrick Lenz.
Original Post: Improving CMS Usability
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I'm developing an advanced content management for a local community portal network type kind of thing right now. With Web 2.0 buzz being all over these days, I was pondering for usability enhancements concerning the tedious task of image placement within an article.
The typical editor and as such the typical CMS user is neither HTML nor Markdown aware. While you can make them use advanced blogging tools such as Marsedit and ecto (which even has what-you-see-is-what-you-get editing), this just doesn't scale.
Problems that arise are (among others):
Enforcing a company-wide styleguide for image placement
Removing image duplication on the webserver by placing commonly used images into a picture pool
Therefore we're back to a browser based interface. With the recent addition of the amazing script.aculo.us javascript helpers to Rails 0.13 this isn't a bad thing at all though.
The first prototype of the drag'n'drop image placement interface was done in a few hours of Disrupted Development (you know those days when people just don't care whether you're trying to concentrate on something specific and bother you nonetheless, don't you?). There are still a few issues to nail down, such as making the image chooser scale to possibly hundreds of images. But as a proof of concept it's coming along nicely.
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