[pmwiki-users] Please challenge me: Script idea

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Thu, Oct 05, 2006 at 12:31:57PM +0200, Mike wrote:
> 1) Store the images as pmwiki attachments, and then use the PmWiki
> mechanisms (e.g. EnableDirectDownload=0 etc.) to process the images. 

I think this works okay -- you're correct that you might want
custom groups for the galleries.

> 2) Protect the pictures directory with a .htaccess file, and then find a
> way to make sure that the image remains readable as long as it's called
> from the PmWiki script, e.g. by providing username/password as part of
> the URL. 

I probably wouldn't do this one -- putting any sort of username/password
in the URL means that security might be a challenge (however, one could
use one-time passwords for this :-), and it also assumes that the
browser knows how to handle it properly.

> 3) Write a new PmWiki action like ?action=showpic that will be used in
> the <img> tag to display the pictures, much similar to ?action=download

This works for me as well.

One thing that will be important to consider is that authors will
likely want to be able to refer to the pictures from outside of the
Gallery pages themselves.  So, perhaps there would need to be a
convenient markup for that... and that would seem to argue towards
using the existing Attach: mechanism somehow (#1 above).

Personally the requirement to upload gallery images into 
subdirectories of uploads/ wouldn't be a big issue for me...
but that's just me.

Another possibility that could be very useful might be
to come up with a "mass-attachments" form that allows multiple
attachments to be uploaded at once (i.e., to replace or as
an alternative to PmWiki's single-upload attachment form).

Hope this helps,

Pm