WebWise Solutions

A key to a growing, thriving community is a following of contributors who are empowered to... well... contribute. Making it easy for your members to contribute is a fundamental way to keep them happy, participating, and visiting often.

For the most part, content management systems (like Drupal) make audience participation easy. A good CMS allows users to comment on articles, vote in polls, and even contribute their own stories.

It gets more complicated, however, when you want to empower your users to include images in their stories.

Trial and Error

After trying a boatload of file and image management solutions, we've found one, the IMCE module, that goes a long way to empower our users -- within reason.

What the Client Wants ...

Our clients are mostly commercial and they (like most clients) want the best of all worlds. They want to leverage the knowledge, enthusiasm, and talent of users in a community. But, ("Everybody has a big but." Pee-wee Herman, 1985) at the same time they want to limit the heft of the images (server space isn't free, ya know), the physical dimensions (oversized images can make a good template go really bad) and, when at all possible, limit users to submitting sizes (or be forced to submit sizes) that fit the corporate design grid.

A Working Solution (and a solution that works!)

The IMCE module does a lot to solve all of these problems. And it's fairly easy to set up and use taboot!

Here's what we like about this module:

• No FTP -- users simply browse to their images and press an upload button. They don't have to deal with FTP (and neither do we).
• Users upload images to a folder tied to their user account. Read: users can't accidentally change or delete someone else's images.
• Users can manage (resize, copy, or delete) their files once they're uploaded.
• Administrators can limit the maximum size (px) and weight (kb) of each image.
• Administrators can limit the total size of a user's file repository.
• Once users have uploaded a few files, they can access them from the content submission forms (Create content > Story) and from their personal profile page.
• Clicking a link on the data entry form opens a list of the user's images. Clicking the "add" link next to one of the images automatically generates default HTML that will place the image in the article.

Here's what we don't like:

• The checkboxes and entry fields on the Upload tool are disorganized. Some of the checkbox options wrap onto new lines making it a bit confusing.
• It would be nice (in our environment) to be able to upload several images at once.

IMCE in Action

This is the IMCE administration page. Notice that different settings and thresholds can be assigned to each role.

Click to view.

This is the file administration tool found under the "Personal files" tab on the user's profile page. I used this tool to create these thumbnails that link to larger originals (and fit nicely in our design grid).

Click to view.

This is the form used to contribute Page content. Notice the "Insert image or link" hyperlink that is automatically added to forms of this type.

Click to view.

You can learn more about (and download) Drupal's IMCE module here: http://drupal.org/project/imce.