Asset Integration
From the start, we built Harmony with flexibility as one of our primary goals. Every page on a website is made up of tiny little pieces of information, but, too often, content management systems have just a title and description field.
The first step towards flexibility was to allow developers to define the fields that make up each page. We’ve had this working for quite some time now and love it, but something still felt missing.
The fact is, that the web is full of assets. Images, PDFs and the like are part of every website. While Harmony does allow file uploads1, often times you need to upload a file when you are editing a piece of content. Or, maybe you have already uploaded that asset and you just need the link to it quick. Integrating assets with the content edit form has been solved a multitude of ways over the years, but we are really happy with how we are now handling it. 1It is worth noting that we allowed File Uploads as a field type before this new feature. This builds upon that, by allowing someone to integrate a file with any piece of content.
As of last night, you will now see a “Files” tab on every page you edit in Harmony. From this tab, you can search for existing files or upload new ones. We even show the last 5 that you have uploaded, just in case you did think ahead and upload the file before going to edit the content. Next to each file is a handy little clipboard that will copy the file’s path to your clipboard so all you have to do is paste it into the content you are editing.
Every file you upload is linked to the content you are viewing behind the scenes. This means if you leave and come back, the file will still be there, waiting for you to make use of it. If you have already uploaded the asset, you can search for it by filename and link it to the page using the green “+” icon. If, on the other hand, you want to unlink a file, simply click the red “x” icon.
We think this is a big win and are really excited to use it for ourselves, kind of like I just did to drop the preview image in this post.
Nice work (and nice to see our www.lucidcode.co.nz) screenshot in there ;)
@Galen – Ha. Good catch. Thanks! Glad you like it. We have so much more up our sleeves. If only there was more time in the day. :)
Hey Harmony crew,
I want to lend an idea for this asset integration. We actually began developing the idea which in the end didn’t get picked up. But the basic idea is that instead of requiring a file upload the user can simply enter the url (or location of a image on the web) in a text input field which then behind the scene grabs the image resizes and as an advanced feature allows the user to crop an image.
Most of the images used on blogs today are re-blogged from another location. I imagine this would be a great feature harmony could offer.
It’s a simple UI improvement.
_
SimpleScott