Website image manager with copy/paste? (Flash?)

Question

I'm looking for a web based upload manager, with good support for images. It should be as easy as possible for novice users to "add images to a website". I could use such a thing for two use cases:

• A CMS for external use, needs proper image support (1-file upload doesn't quite cut it).
• A Wiki for internal use, to get popular it will need the ability to put in screenshots easily without bothering with "save screenshot to file - upload file - put complicated markup on page to display image".

Ideally, the thing I'm looking for shows galleries of uploaded images and allows the user to add/remove/replace images.

I know there are probably a lot of server-side PHP scripts that can do things like this, in a pop-up window, or with AJAX, but where they're all lacking is in copy/paste support. Especially for the internal support site, a printscreen + paste would be an ideal solution, but I'm unable to find a package that supports this.

I'm guessing this should be possible using Flash; unless there's no way to paste image data into a Flash file. I don't know much about that though. I could probably develop something myself, but I really don't want to have to learn Flash, and I don't have the $$ to pay for the Flash development tools.

So tell me, is it even possible to copy/paste bitmap data into a Flash movie? And has someone perhaps already written an elegant image/upload manager that makes use of it?

Answer 1

I don't believe Flash supports copy and paste like this. I've looked into this a number of times. I believe your best bet is to go down the same road we went down when trying to solve this problem. We use DotNetNuke as our CMS and we created a MetaWeblog bridge for DotNetNuke so you can manage your content using MetaWeblog clients like Windows Live Writer. This has worked really well for us, since the end users can edit their web content in a Windows application rather than a web-based editor which gives the user more stability and a much wider range of features, like the ability to drag and drop images. if you're interested in using DotNetNuke, you might want to check out our product. It's called metaPost and there's a free community edition you can download and try.

There's a link on the main page of our site to the product page as well as some examples of some of the features available in the Professional Edition of the product (see the tabs).

http://www.itcrossing.com/

HTH,

Don