Global Moxie

Kitsy Babcock, Library Assistant by Joan Sargent. 1958.

Today I put the final touches on Big Medium’s library editor, a major new feature for the Big Medium 2 beta. I’ve got a bit of spit-and-polish work to do on a few other features before releasing the next update sometime next week, but here’s a preview and some screenshots (click to enlarge).

First some background. The library is where Big Medium stores all of the stuff that you stick to your site’s pages: images, documents, audio, video and people. When you’re editing or adding a page, for example, you can select an image from the library to add to the page, or load a brand new image (which in turn gets added to the library for later reuse).

I have to say that image-handling is particularly cool. Unlike other CMS systems with similar library features, there’s no need for you to manage multiple versions of the same photo (e.g., small, medium and large sizes). Big Medium manages all of the image sizes for you. Just select your photo of Aunt Mathilde, and Big Medium handles the rest, displaying the old bird in a small thumbnail image alongside links and a medium-sized version on the page itself, with an option to view Mathilde’s mug close-up. In the code biz, we call this an abstraction: In the library, you see only a single entry for Auntie, while the complexity of juggling multiple versions and sizes of the image is handled behind the scenes.

Adding a library image from a page's edit screen.

My bold brigade of beta testers will say that’s old hat, and indeed, the library has been part of Big Medium 2 since the get-go.

Until now, though, your only access to the library was from the edit screen for an individual page. You could only add library items one at a time and only when editing a page. While you could remove images and documents from pages, you couldn’t remove them from the library completely.

That’s where the new library editor comes in.

Batch-Load Images and Documents

The library editor makes it easy to add lots of files at once to your site’s library, with two ways to do it.

Batch-upload images and documents.

The old-school method lets you select several individual files on a single screen. Big Medium gives you three fields to get you started, but you can click “Give me more items” to get as many fields as you need. Click browse in each field to select the image and upload when you’re done.

But if you have 50 images to add, all that clicking and file-browsing gets tedious in a hurry. So the library editor also lets you upload a zip file. Put all your images into one directory, zip it up, and give Big Medium the zip file. Big Medium takes it from there, adding each of your images or documents to the library.

Choose To Reuse

Until now, every image and document ever added to the site showed up in the library browser when you wanted to add an item to a page. Got 5000 images? That meant you had to browse 5000 images to find the one you wanted. Ugh. Often you have images or documents that will be used just once on one page; you know you’ll never reuse them, and you don’t want it to show up in the library browser.

When you edit library items, you can choose whether to display them in the library and whether to share.

Now you can indicate whether you want to make the item available for reuse. If yes, it will show up in the library tab when you add a new item to the page. If no, it won’t. Either way, it’s still tucked away in the library; you’re just choosing whether or not you want to hide it. That means you can change your mind later, moving items in and out of the library view as you like.

As before, you can also choose whether or not to share items with other editors of the same site. Teachers at a school website, for example, might have document downloads and images that are specific to their courses. When editing their classroom pages, the teachers could choose not to share those documents and images with other teachers. The owner can still see and reuse those items, but they’re no longer available to other teachers.

And speaking of privacy, all library items are owned by the person who created them. While people with webmaster or administrator privileges can edit any item, everyone else can make changes only to library items that they own.

Sleek Browsing Interface

The library finally has a spiffy reading room, with a menu screen that lets you browse, sort and filter images and documents.

And friends, I have to confess that I really wrestled with the right interface for this. The challenge is that the various types of library items—images, documents and people—need to be represented differently for easy scanning. For images, of course, the image itself should be front-and-center. For documents, the title is important, but so is the document icon. For people, it’s all about the name.

How to create a single interface that could represent these disparate content types and also accommodate new library types in the future? It took a lot of experimentation but in the end, the solution was simple. The library editor offers three display modes: “Image & text, “Image only,” and “Text only.” Clicking the link for any of these instantly changes the view so that you can see the info that’s most relevant to your task.

Going to “Image only” shows a compact view of thumbnail images that lets you quickly scan a large set of pictures. Clicking “Image & Text” expands the view to include image title, owner and modification date. When browsing people, it’s more useful to see just the name; clicking “Text only” displays the names in a compact column view.

The "image only" view.

The "image & text" display.

The "text only" display.

All items that you have permission to edit also get a checkbox, which lets you select multiple items to change all at once. You can delete them. Or you can change their status, toggling whether they should appear in the library or whether they’re shared with others. People with webmaster or administrator privileges can change the owner, too.

Closer to the Release of Big Medium 2

All in all, I’m really pleased with the way the library editor has turned out. While adding and editing text in the page editor is no doubt where Big Medium earns its supper, a site’s images and documents are often what brings it to life. Making it easy to manage this secondary content is a big step toward getting Big Medium 2 out of beta.

There’s still a ways to go, with some big-ticket features yet to complete, but I’m excited about how Big Medium 2 is shaping up. I hope you are, too. If you haven’t tried it yet, watch for next week’s beta update, and give it a whirl.