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Posted by "Richard Lynch" on 10/14/05 23:39
This is more of a user education problem than anything, I suspect, but...
Okay, so I'm kind of like a closing pitcher on this project where the
original developer is, errr, surfing in California or something...
Anyway, he's got a bunch of custom back-end CMS pages using fckEditor
(sp?) and I'm pretty much just leaving those alone as a "black box --
don't touch" :-)
Unfortunately, I've recently received a bug report, to whit:
"We can upload GIFs okay, but we get an error message about wrong file
type when we try to upload PDFs"
I was at first befuddled about this, as there is no file upload
functionality AT ALL in this project...
So I dunno where they thought they were uploadings GIFs.
[Sure, *you* know it now cuz you got forshadowing about fckEditor in
the first paragraph. Cheater.]
Eventually, I realized they were talking about what they call the
"Microsoft-like editor" (which you and I know as fckEditor) and that
they were attempting to cram a PDF file into it.
Since they are often using the fckEditor to cram in a Poster for
theatre productions, this is not as weird as it sounds...
Actually, from the end user perspective, I can completely understand
that they expect to be able to cram a PDF in there, just like they do
Posters in GIF and JPG format.
To them, the end user, it's really all the same thing.
To me, of course, it's so totally not the same thing, I don't even
know how to proceed.
The problem I have now is that they NEED PDF support. We're talking
here about pre-existing documents such as floor charts for ticket
sales, brochures, Technical Specifications (for potential renters or
theatre production companies) and (some day) Legal Contracts.
So...
Do I:
A) Attempt to hack fckEditor to "allow" a PDF to get uploaded, and
then display a link to the PDF instead of alink to the fckEditor
output.
B) Give them a separate, possibly confusing, input to upload files to
tie in as links to the fckEditor area
C) Dump fckEditor and only allow file upload, requiring them to
compose HTML pages in some external application
Has anybody faced this, and with VERY non-technical users had better
luck one way or another?
Which of these fit in best with PHP, and why?
I'm mostly used to educable users who can flex on functionality to get
what they want, but this is more a case of needing to make this WORK
for them their way.
THANKS!
PS
He's also using some kind of template language -- I don't even know
which one, as I'm just copy/pasting the bits of that to make it work,
rather than actually diving into it. That probably doesn't matter,
but if it does, I'll dig out the template name/version.
--
Like Music?
http://l-i-e.com/artists.htm
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