Am trying to add a new media library feature – can it be done with Widget Builder?
WHAT WE NEED:
The ability to centrally locate all videos, audio files, photos and PDFs (internal to this site) in one location, allowing users to search, sort and view them based on type of media and assigned tags. Each media asset needs to include a title, thumbnail image, additional verbiage and a link.
WHAT WE’VE ALREADY TRIED:
Auto-list: this provides a list of all the assets titles only.
Blog: Have set the library up as a blog without comments, and each asset is actually a post. Am still wrestling with it…
The following are example media assets set up as rich-text widgets inside posts, with the first one for documents and the 2nd one for images.
Hi Debbie,
Some of my more creative approaches using the widget builder and the DTS API have fallen short (I’ll keep toying with this when I have time, but time is hard to come by), but one out-of-box method you didn’t mention as having tried may get you close: Our categories widget coupled with the results widget.
Essentially you would create a page for each media asset with a Rich Text widget like you have outlined, inserting a Read More break below the content so that all of it would show up in the page’s summary. Next, develop a category tree, and then assign each media asset’s page to a corresponding category.
Once you have that setup, create a page with a Category widget and a Results widget. Configure the Category widget to pull from the directory where your media pages are located, and define the current page as the “Results” page. Configure the Results widget to show summaries (so it will output all the info from your media pages), and hide any unneeded fields.
Let me know if this would get you any closer to what you’re trying to setup. Note that you will need to publish this page and the media asset pages out to a live environment for them to function.
As I mentioned on the call when this originally came up, the potential new set of tools Dan had outlined still sounds like a much better fit; this is just something else to try in the meantime.
Hi Nathaniel-
Back about 6 months ago I believe you or John mentioned a new “Data Set Widget” that was being developed and how it might be the solution we need for our Media Library (outlined above). Can you tell me if that tool is still under development, and if so what the estimated release time frame is?
thanks!
Hi Nathaniel-
In your last response on this topic you mentioned that there’s a potential set of new tools that Dan had outlined and that it would probably be a better fit for what we need to accomplish for a media library. Are there any updates on that?
Debbie,
We have done research on a “Data set widget” that would be appropriate for your Media Library, but we do not have it scheduled on the roadmap at this time. The reason for this is that it was somewhat of a large effort and we did not see enough need among multiple customers to warrant prioritizing it at this time. With issues such as these we have our coaches keep an ear out for this need since these types of issues sometimes don’t make their way to the community.
Thanks for the update. We’ll try to come up with alternative solution then.
