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#1 2026-06-25 15:10:52
- BryanA.
- Member
- From: Maryland, USA
- Registered: 2007-08-12
- Posts: 106
A Christmas Wish - multi-media content upload UI with tagging
Hello all, long time! I’m unsure if this exists atm but I’m interested in being able to spontaneously upload multi-media to a txp database for a pending site. Since the site wouldn’t exist ‘yet’ in authorship but would be a domain, the tags would be so I can later sort through what I uploaded by filtering a gallery or have only certain tagged objects available for certain page types/article types.
I’m terrible at code so I have to explain this the long way – I’d like to accumulate food blog content. I love the stuff and since Textpattern once powered my old FoodNewsie dot … I’ve been anxious ever since to do something again. Now I’m in Germany and website laws are different and photography is different and privacy is different so I snuff a lot of ideas. But I’d still love to try. A chef video, a time lapse video, a recipe, food photos, an audio interview, quick snack pic
It’s very elementary until I want to upload it by phone. Then everything is microscopic in the Textpattern UI. My thought is that Textpattern’s use today might now include an easy app that I take time to configure for field use like so many massive content websites. Does such a thing exist? Can I realistically configure the setup of such a thing? ex As goofy as Instagram can be, it’s so easy to share content on the move.
FoodNewsie was a labor of love. Every serious post took hours to arrange and get online and that was with a now ancient template (Aperture, I think, which was brilliant). I’d like something much more spontaneous and I’ll only deal with Textpattern. It’s love.
Voice Actor – starting up a site for that good book stuff. BryanDoesBooks in some spots
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Re: A Christmas Wish - multi-media content upload UI with tagging
That’s a really interesting project.
I’m of the opinion that a lot of stuff like this can be handled with plugins and a dashboard, to help transform incoming data from various forms. It’s not a quick route, but Txp is more than capable of taking “stuff” you upload to a dashboard page and diverting it to various tables that conform to the way data is stored inside Article containers. Then your templates take over and show your ideas to the world.
“Desktop blogging” offers something akin to what you outline, so you might try installing something like MarsEdit. Enable the RPC server inside Txp’s Prefs and you can then configure third-party desktop blogging software that supports the MovableType API or Metaweblog API to interact with Txp. I think we support both, to some degree.
However…
At the moment, our integration is basic at best. For example, we have recently added support for uploading images but not for attaching them to articles so you need to do that bit manually inside Txp. And we don’t (yet) have support for attaching custom field data, which is annoying. It’s something I’d definitely like to offer.
Looking forward with development, Txp 5.0 sounds like it’ll be a match made in heaven for your content because we are introducing the concept of custom content types. So you could create different ‘types’ of content – a podcast, a video blog post, a recipe, etc – and create an article of that ‘type’ with its own set of custom fields. So, come the revolution when we bolster the RPC server capabilities (which I’d like to do in tandem with Txp 5 development) you may be able to get close to the above dream.
I don’t really know the full capabilities of the various APIs yet as I need to devote some time to grokking what’s possible, but my goal is to make it easier for Txp to consume content from sources other than the Admin Interface and have it update the database internally as if you had been using the UI.
I have a project I’m working on at the moment which will need this kind of functionality – a glorified webhook which sits there listening for incoming requests – and when triggered with an authenticated request, does “stuff” as commanded by the incoming request. For example, insert or update articles, upload images, configure categories, fetch article fields and display them, and so forth.
If you would like to discuss your requirements in more detail, feel free to jot them here for the community to offer advice, or drop me an email privately if that’s more your thing. We may be able to assist with getting you some of the way there already, and your feedback may well steer some of the direction that we take Textpattern 5
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Re: A Christmas Wish - multi-media content upload UI with tagging
If it fits your plans to first gather content and then later do something with it via Textpattern, another idea might be to use a tool or platform that can already handle the gathering and that has an API that you can use to extract data about the content – or retrieve the actual content – for later use in Textpattern.
I’ve used Dropmark for this in the past. In my case it was a knowledge base. The organisation uploaded PDFs, documents and links to websites, tagged them according to a scheme and added summaries where necessary. I devised a system of prefixes to be able to filter out certain types of keywords more cleanly from the general keywords, and the Dropmark UI will recognize previously used tags to speed up tagging. It also has a mobile app and browser extension for easier use.
With bloke’s help I then used the Dropmark API to retrieve the data on the stored items and built a knowledge base from that using Textpattern. In my use case, the actual files are still stored on Dropmark, and Textpattern provides the custom front end for searching the collection and accessing the collection. Another reason why I opted for that was because Dropmark automatically handled making preview images of the PDFs. If you’re interested, I can send you a link.
BTW: as you have probably surmised, be careful about reposting food imagery. There are unscrupulous lawyers out there hunting for re-used images from recipe platforms, and they charge eye-watering fees for IP violations. It’s not worth the hassle.
Greetings from a little down the road from you :-)
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#4 Yesterday 21:46:30
- BryanA.
- Member
- From: Maryland, USA
- Registered: 2007-08-12
- Posts: 106
Re: A Christmas Wish - multi-media content upload UI with tagging
All music to my ears, guys!
My snazzy new Android phone means I’m looking at Dropmark alternatives…
MyMind, Raindrop and Fabric have similar workflows, different free tiers and accept audio and video and links, etc. I don’t know what the export output looks like but my research shows
Fabric.so might be my best bet for multimedia
Raindrop.io offers the friendliest free tier
MyMind has the best native Android app
So I’d welcome any pointers on which to look at first.
Open Live Writer for PC would be the Windows software like MarsEdit but that sounds like a sketchy choice 1. it’s for the laptop, not phone (this isn’t the end of the world but it’s one more [clunky] chain link than I was dreaming of) and, 2. it feels like updates are passionate but slow.
So your advice(s) is really well received. I’ve put some URLs out there for the frau to consider. If TXP 5 were able to consume this output as resources and tags aligned to make articles faster to produce giving me more time to edit and write well, that would be the 21c leap in my opinion. I know that Custom Field Data has been a long time coming but I was never sure how to fully exploit that.
I’m going to investigate some of the Dropmark options and see what it feels like to move those into TXP – and @Jakob I appreciate the photo reuse warnings; I do proudly shoot my own. It’s not always great but it beats being dishonest about it!
Voice Actor – starting up a site for that good book stuff. BryanDoesBooks in some spots
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Re: A Christmas Wish - multi-media content upload UI with tagging
BryanA. wrote #343405:
Dropmark alternatives… MyMind, Raindrop and Fabric have similar workflows, different free tiers and accept audio and video and links, etc. I don’t know what the export output looks like but my research.
I’ve not used any of those, and to be honest they look a cut above Dropmark, which seems positively old-school in comparison. From a brief search, it seems Raindrop and Fabric both have an API for retrieving content for using elsewhere. MyMind doesn’t appear to but there’s a GitHub project in Python that someone has made to approximate one. I haven’t looked at any of those in detail.
Fabric seems to have a publish website from notes function that might bypass Textpattern entirely, depending on your specific needs.
It might be worth trying some of those out and thinking about how you might want to use what you have collected later. For example, Dropmark has collections (albums) and general tags but no custom fields of its own. It stores things like upload date, but nothing for adding the author or document date. So I used prefixes for some tags e.g. a- for author, t- for document type, d- for date to separate out certain tagged data that I wanted to show separately of the general tags. If there are things you might want to collect but not publish, you might want some kind of “don’t publish” tag. Dropmark’s collections avoid that for the most part by allowing you to grab api data from only certain collections.
I appreciate the photo reuse warnings; I do proudly shoot my own. It’s not always great but it beats being dishonest about it!
Own photos are the best :-) even more so when you’re pleased enough with your own cooking to want to save it for posterity.
TXP Builders – finely-crafted code, design and txp
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