[Tikiwiki-devel] File storage in tikiwiki 1.10

[WEBER P. <Pat...@co...>]

Hi,

Currently, File Galleries, Image Galleries and other file attachments
(in wiki, forum, ... but also files managed by FCKeditor) are stored and
managed in different places.

This is why, as already discussed on IRC with some of you, we are
planning to change this by greatly enhancing File Galleries (which is
the most generic and featured one).

This will imply the following concrete changes :

	* Add a browsing view with thumbnails + slideshow option, in
order to be able to replace image galleries and to benefit from both
filegals and imagegals advantages,

	* Handle wiki / forum / tracker / etc. file attachments, in
order to be able to not only upload, but also to choose a file from
filegals, when attaching files,

	* Greatly factorize and clean the code, and have a simple and
easy-to-use API to manage files everywhere,

	* Have a more generic architecture both in PHP and in the
database, and be able to manage an unlimited number of meta data for
each files,


Note that the first point will allow to have a thumbnail view of more
file types (not just images). We may implement PDF thumbnails and maybe
more. For file types that won't have a thumbnail based on their content,
we will probably simply use file type icons.

The choice to simply enhance filegals is only to have quite no impact on
existing users / installations. In fact, we will keep existing imagegals
and users will have the choice between them or filegals with same
optional features, but I propose to desactivate them from fresh new
installs and to develop new features / enhancements only in filegals.

Technical modifications won't be seen by users and admins either. There
are here only to make future developments easier to do and to maintain
;)

Any comments / suggestions ?

Nyloth.