I’m about to start building a site for an organisation that helps people supporting those with dementia, to get ‘stories’ published. Most of the people I’m dealing with are seniors. I produced a test site for them to have a general ‘play’ with and it was decided that as a ‘proof of concept’ it worked well with really just one sticking point - uploading images and all the steps involved. The idea is that I give them 6 image TVs to use per article. I also give them 6 content areas so the images can be slipped into the text without one ‘interfering’ with the other. This should work well. If no image(s) is uploaded the text will just flow on. The difficult part (for them) is the upload stage of getting the images into the TVs - too many steps. Any ideas of how I could simplify this would be gratefully received.
I’m not sure how much of an improvement it would be, but NewsPublisher would let you strip down the number of fields to the 6 TVs and whatever other fields they need to see. The upload would be done in the front end with elFinder. The elFinder file browser and upload system is fairly friendly, but I’m not sure how it would compare to what you’re using now.
I’m just using the Modx native upload - I’m thinking though if I set a media source with a defined path then that should cut out a couple of steps.
It should, though you can also do that in NewsPublisher, with (I think) a little more control over what they see in the file tree, though it would take a little more fiddling around to set things up.
What is the difficulty exactly? If you’ve set up a media source for these images, then click the icon to get into that from the TVs should open right to that folder. Then, I agree, there are few steps to upload the image (MODX 3 will make this easier!). Depending on how many images are in that folder, you might want to set the default sort order in the media browser (system setting: modx_browser_default_sort) to “lastmod” instead of “name”. That way, the image that was just uploaded will show up as the first one, so it’s easy to see and select.
Setting a media source solved half the problem. This is a magazine-style site where they publish a set of articles into an ‘issue’ every few months. Having article related folders within the the media source helped them keep the uploaded images organised. I also downloaded that file structure so they each have a copy of it on their local devices. That solved another part of the problem - keeps them organised locally. I then created a series of short videos that they can access via the website. They seem to be getting on just fine.