#1238 - Capability to add photos in bulk to a news/blog post - Comments

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You can attach a zip/tar and tell it to auto-extract. However, I'll leave this open as allowing multi-selections in the uploader would be simpler.

By "leave this open", it means you'll calculate the price to allow multi-selections?

Thanks for the sponsorship :)!

This is now implemented in the 'batch_attachments' branch (a v9 fork). I will keep this tracker issue open until it is merged into the v10 branch.

Rishi - I will now manually deploy for your site.

Note for other users...

While this feature was a bit tricky to implement, the patch is not too bad. You can see the whole thing here:
https://github.com/chrisgraham/Composr/commit/fd969bf2893982269cbc0dc449f6fd6f6b9efb72

It requires the plupload addon.

Rishi - deployed to your site, and (according to my test) working.

Hello,

I ran a test just now. I selected six photos, set them to 'embed directly' and display without thumbnails. It seemed to load them all, as I saw six attachment tag buttons appear. But then when I clicked Preview, and then Add, it wasn't working right. It displays the first photo in full size. Then it displays the 2nd photo full size, and duplicates the 2nd photo four more times. Then it displays the other four photos underneath, but in thumbnail form.

Sorry about that - this should now be fixed.

I tested with the same six images again, same instructions. This time it displays the first image six times, then displays the other five images in thumbnail style

Sorry again, I hadn't quite put the fix up correctly. I have now, and I have re-tested on your end and it seems to have worked.

okay, working now, thank you!

One thing I just noticed, is that after selecting and uploading multiple files at once, we don't get another upload field for adding more files. An example of needing this capability, is the 10mb single upload limit. Someone might need to do multiple uploads of bulk photos because of this.

Fixed

okay, tested and looks good, thank you

Hello Chris,

We just discovered a bug related to which browser is being used. I had only tested on Chrome and it worked.
Another monk here tried to create a news article in firefox v.21. He uploaded bunch of photos at once. They all loaded and the comcode tags appeared. He then clicked Preview button so that he could then see which photo was related to which tag, and rearrange the tags and add captions. However after clicking Preview, he could not select, move, or put the cursor between any tag. I think he couldn't do this before clicking Preview either.

I haven't tested this in any other browser.

I also notice that the blue upload progress bar appears separately for each upload, and there is a brief pause between each one. This could cause a user to think the uploading is done before it actually is and start pressing other buttons prematurely. Could you make it so that only one progress bar appears which encompasses all the images as they're uploading?

Browser's can be a bit awkward about clicking between things in the editor. I have now amended it to have a line break between them, this should resolve the issue.

Regarding a combined upload bar, this is a bit awkward. If I remember correctly, we have made some design changes to the uploader in v10, making multiple bars visible at once. Having just a single bar would be prohibitively difficult, because we'd need to get quite deep in making changes to plupload.

Thank you for the amendment.

Okay, multiple bars solves that issue.

We encountered bugs over the course of a few hours this afternoon which we're having a hard time pinpointing the exact source, and I don't even know if it's due to this new feature of multiple image file selection for uploading, or if it was something pre-existing. It's mysterious

1) If we go to news article creation screen, paste in the text of an article, put the cursor near top and upload one image attachment there, then go down to bottom of article and put the cursor there, click 2nd 'browse' button and select a group of images, all the tags are added, we wait for them all to finish uploading, then we click 'Preview', it shows only the first single image we uploaded plus the very last image in the 2nd group we had uploaded. If we click 'Add' article, that's still what we see.

2) Now a slightly different scenario-- If we go to news article creation screen, paste in the text of an article, put cursor at the bottom and upload all the images at once in one 'browse', then click 'Preview', then cut and move one of the attachment tags and paste it higher up in the article, then click Preview again, it hangs for a while and then tells us Internal Server Error. If we then click 'Add', it hangs some more and finally returns another Internal Server Error, but then we find the article listed in Latest Headlines, but if you click in to it you see this message in the article body-- "[This entry failed to be properly created; please edit/delete as appropriate]". However another time after going through the same creation process and encountering the error, I discovered that the full article did actually appear including the photos. But when I went in to edit it and add some caption text next to attachment tags and then clicked Save, it didn't save anything I had added.
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We were doing so many tests of all this with little variations, trying to pinpoint what's going on, so it's hard to describe everything to you, but maybe you have enough to work with. We can try and fetch the server error log if you need to see that.

This feature is certainly turning into quick a complexity, tracking all the different file-sets/Comcode and settings across Javascript/HTML/requests.

I believe I have fixed '1'.

I could not reproduce '2' on your server or my dev server. However I tried after fixing '1', which means it may have been the same as '1'.