Multimedia Reportage (Slideshow/Mini Gallery)

The purpose of this component would be to enable easier creative story telling on the web by a combination of images, video, text. The initial idea comes from the need to simplify the workflow described in How to add mini-galleries (slideshows) to Campsite articles, but there is no reason why not to make a more general feature that would allow use of video, flash movies, audio, etc. (what we are talking here is a set of elements that need to be presented as a whole, e.g. in a carousel format).

With the new integrated multimedia #2899 in 3.4, we should think of a way of making Campsite aware of packages of multimedia elements internally as well (currently you can cobble up packages in the front end via templates fairly easily). This should:

1. Allow web developers to feature, display, list, repackage multimedia packages on the front end (e.g. create a page with all slideshows, or slideshows with certain properties/tags) more easily.
2. Enable photographers/journalists/editors/ to create, manage, tag (attach metadate or topics to packages as a whole)
3. Allow track usage (used in article x) /stats for the package as a whole
4. Enable syndication, embedding on other sites

Let’s start developing the idea on a simple slideshow component:

1. Photos for Mini Gallery/Slideshow xyz should be assigned a package ID (these images belong to package xyz).
2. Package xyz should be attachable to any/multiple articles

The UIs:

• Create Slideshow:
  1. Add images to the slideshow either from the existing images in the archive or upload new.
  2. Delete images from the slideshow
  3. Order images
  4. Create/Edit caption for each image/image descriptions
  5. The whole UI should be as WYSYWIG as possible, but if that’s too complicated (should we have ability to specify the template, i.e. CSS stuff?) we could have something like:
     • Image
     • Caption/text box (text box, but think of using customized WYSYWYG editor, e.g. TinyMCE, sized to fit image width, fewer toolbar options??)
     • Row of thumbnails of all images in the Slideshow
     • Previous/Next arrows
  6. Preview

• Manage Slideshows
  1. Standard Campsite multimedia list with all standard actions (a revised version of the UI of the current Image Archive, which will be defined in 3.4) with the following additional options:
     • Duplicate
     • Translate (captions, descriptions)
  2. The list would be accessible from the new multimedia archive (as a tab? We need to figure it out) and from the main menu (Content–>Packages–>Slideshows??)
  3. “Add new” (use standard Campsite interface convention)
• UI on Article Edit screen
  1. Slideshow +Attach (standard Campsite element in the right column)
  2. “Create new” invokes the main Create Slideshow interface (just like in the Images element).

OTHER IDEAS:

• Consider “widgetizing” the slideshow (i.e. assign specific templates as discussed in this wiki)
• Add photo editing interface (ideally share that with the Image Archive) … or introduce options to fit the image to the assigned dimensions (shrink to fit, crop) when image is added to slideshow: Neither of these functions currently exist in Campsite, and these ideas should be explored in a separate wiki.