[wp-hackers] Inclusion of TimThumb -- anyone game?

[Mike Schinkel]

"Paul" <paul at codehooligans.com> wrote:
> I have a better solution. I wrote a Media Tags plugin back 
> Dec 2008 so I can stop asking the client to name the image 
> with a certain pattern.  

FWIW, I was excited about the Media Tags plugin plugin for my current project but found that it didn't work well for the client's workflow because it is too free-form and because of how it stored its data in the database. I ended up writing a custom plugin for "video channels."

While I still think Media Tags is conceptually a good plugin and really useful as is, it doesn't address use cases where there is a need for the admin to explicitly specify a selection of specific sizes with optionally named specific roles.  It also doesn't (currently) store rich enough data in the databasse to associate the image type of "sidebar" with the fact that the sidebar image must be, for example, 120x180. Even more, it stores its media tags solely in postmeta instead of in the taxonomy tables where it could better leveraged by additional types of SQL queries.

Actually, I'd love to see media tags functionality rolled into the core to address the free-form tagging use-case, but would want to see it rearchitected to use taxonomny before that was done.  For the use case that requires structured image functionality, see my previous email.

FWIW, I've done a lot of the code for this in my past several projects and, if we can agree on what it should look like I can either contribute the code to the core or provide a plugin that meets the design agreed to by the community, or collaborate with others to do the same.

-Mike Schinkel
http://mikeschinkel.com/