I’ve just spent a few minutes checking out Radim Novotny’s new product collective.contentleadimage aka “ContentLeadImage,” which promises to provide simple thumbnail images for all Plone content objects.  It’s a neat idea that scratches an itch we often feel here at ONE/Northwest, but unfortunately, I think the execution is still a bit too rough for production use.  I’d love to see Radim develop it a bit more, though, so here are some of my thoughts and suggestions.

Let’s start with the concept: Plone’s built-in News Item content type provides a handy “thumbnail image” field that lets you upload an image that appears in content listings and the object display.  It’s a really nice, simple way to add visual appeal to News Item objects.  I’ve often wondered why all standard Plone objects don’t include this capability.  Apparently Radim did as well, and it is this problem that ContentLeadImage solves.  Bravo!

ContentLeadImage also provides a nice little control panel configlet that lets you configure the sitewide image and thumbnail size, as well as letting you choose whether to show the thumbnail image in the body text of the content object, next to the description, or (oddly) both.

Finally, ContentLeadImage provides a new view for folders, that slips the thumbnail image into the folder listing view.  Nice!

While the basic concepts are sound, I have a few minor things to pick on:

• First, and most importantly, I think ContentLeadImage needs to let the site administrator choose which content types get lead images.  Applying them to all content types in the site is probably not wise.  For example, ContentLeadImage adds a lead image to News Items, which already have an equivalent feature, and to Images, which seems rather redundant.
  
• The lead images are not really formatted; they should be display with styles that mimic how News Item images work, both in the content object, and in the new folder listing view.  
• Turning on lead images in both the Description and body text (the default settings), produces two lead images on each content item, and is not a very sensible default setting.  I’d suggest showing the image in the body text only, styled to look like a News Item image.
• Lead images are scaled down to user-configured sizes, but unfortunately, the images are scaled once at upload time, and if you change the sizes later, they’re not rescaled.  I think it might make more sense to use Plone’s built-in PIL resize scales, and let the user choose between them, and change whenever they like.
• Images can’t be captioned.  That would be nice.
• Lead image field should probably be after the body text field, not before it, ala News item images.
  

Ultimately, I’d like to see this functionality implemented directly in ATContentTypes, with a PLIP, for Plone 3.3 or 4.0. 

Nathan Van Gheem’s beautiful product-in-the-making, ATImageEditor, an image editor for Plone, is coming along nicely. Since I first wrote a gushy love note to it a couple weeks ago, Nathan’s been hard at work improving it with:

• Control over JPEG compression quality (very useful!)
  
• A new UI featuring a photoshop-style floating image editor palette (very spiffy!)
• Display of image dimensions and filesize
• Brightness/contrast and sharpen/blur adjustments
  
• Undo/redo support

Wow! This is probably the most day-to-day useful-for-end-users Plone product since Steve McMahon’s amazing PloneFormGen.

Nathan’s still got a pretty short todo list, so I’m hoping to see a final release soon! I’m sure he’d love to have a few more eyeballs on it to test, so if being able to edit images directly inside of Plone sounds good to you, give it a whirl!

For the impatient, here’s a one-minute screencast of ATImageEditor in action.