[MTOS-dev] MT as asset aggregator

[Bud Gibson]

Thanks for those extremely helpful insights.  I'm sure they come from the
video aggregation site you mentioned on pronet a couple of months back.

>From my perspective, it sounds like I could get what I want by using custom
fields.  The truth of the matter is that on all the media sites I have
created, the entry can really be considered metadata for the video asset,
not the other way around.

The concern you have when overriding core methods is that you are letting
yourself in for a maintenance nightmare.

I have to say I find the decision to base an association between two
entities in MT on the state of markup in two general database fields a
little disappointing.

Bud

On Jan 1, 2008 9:43 PM, Timothy Appnel <tim at appnel.com> wrote:

> As you know I'm prone to bending MT to my will so I'm with you Dan.
> There is one annoying condition that makes extending the asset manager
> through plugins rather hard though.
>
> MT only creates asset associations with entries and pages by embedding
> the right markup in text and more fields. You can of course create an
> association in the API, but if the entry/page text or text_more is
> changed the MT::Entry object wipes out all of the associations. (Look
> at the sync_assets method in MT::Entry.)
>
> So there are a couple of things of note here.
>
> The first is that if you are text formatting engine/plugin that
> doesn't allow for HTML markup you can't establish an association. Even
> if it generates the markup MT is looking for the sync_assets method is
> performed on the contents of the text and text_more fields *before*
> being passed through the text formatting engine. Further, if the text
> formatting engine inserts an asset with "wrong" type of markup (an
> image tag or a cut-and-paste YouTube embed) the association isn't
> established either.
>
> The second problem and the one that gets in the way of what I really
> want (asset attachments to an entry or page) is that the entry class
> presumes that asset associations will only be made through something
> like the rich text editor and deletes any association it can't find in
> the markup of text and text_more. This makes creating a plugin to do
> asset attachments a non-starter. Sure you can hack the internals or
> overload it, but
>
> I'd suggest adding an embedded column to MT::ObjectAsset as a Boolean
> that would be used by sync_assets to only delete assets that it noted
> as being embedded in the text of the entry/page. Any assets that have
> embedded=false would remain for a plugin or some other part of the
> system to manage. (I'm suggesting embedded instead of attachment
> because I believe attachments will become the more common usage.)
>
> The first issue is a bit more tricky whereby I don't have a full
> solution to propose. Processing the text after it is passed through
> the text formatting engine may be helpful to text engines that don't
> permit markup. That still doesn't address text formatting engines or
> third party WYSIWYG widgets that don't generate the precise MT markup.
>
> Ideally I'd love to see the attachment functionality built in to the
> core of MT because there aren't enough hours in the day to code every
> plugin I could use. That may be setting my expectations too high that
> I would just settle for the embedded column and the adjusted
> sync_assets methods so different plugins and usage scenarios are at
> least possible.
>
> <tim/>
>
> On 1/1/08, Dan Wolfgang <dan at danandsherree.com> wrote:
> > My feedback is minimal, but here it is: I love all the possibilities
> > that have been thought up for how to use the Assets system. I think
> > it's the most exciting new feature to come out of MT4 and I'm
> > interested to see what it develops into as time goes by. (In
> > fact--when I can get some time--I really hope I can get some plugins
> > together to do some other things *I* want out of the Assets tool.)
>
> --
> Timothy Appnel
> Appnel Solutions
> http://appnel.com/
> _______________________________________________
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> MTOS-dev at sixapart.com
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>



-- 
Bud Gibson
cell:  734-657-4800
web:  http://michiganinnovators.org
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