Story
I can manage all assets I use on my web pages easily in AdminCentral. Assets may be stored inside a page, stored inside a special asset workspace and referenced in a page, or may even be located on an external storage device or space and referenced in a page.
There's a nice overview of all assets, whether they're stored locally on a page, in the asset workspace or on external storage; the overview groups assets according to their storage location and/or their type.
Description of desired behavior
Accessing Digital Asset Management
AdminCentral serves as the main hub to digital assets in Magnolia. It provides a separate entry in the main menu for accessing all three DAM levels Magnolia defines and supports. Support for these levels leads to two types of setups.
Setup 1: supporting assets attached to a page only
This setup covers the basic level as defined in the conceptual overview of Digital Asset Management only. Assets are not actually managed, but are merely uploaded to a single page and thus may not be re-used on another page. Still, Magnolia offers some support for controlling such assets by providing an overview over all assets used on all pages; there has been a significant amount of feedback requesting for such an overview.
Assets on pages are internally mapped to an asset set, which is accessed directly by clicking on the corresponding main menu entry in AdminCentral. This asset set can't be configured and its assets are not editable. Uploaded assets are mapped to an asset with a single rendition only and, again, both are not editable.
Setup 2: supporting actual management of assets
The second setup adds actual asset management to Magnolia. This covers both the intermediate and advanced levels, adding internal management and adapters to external systems at the same time. The main menu entry points to the main interface for asset management.
Assets on pages (see setup 1 above) may still be supported, but that shall be configurable: it must be possible for certain sites to disallow uploading assets to pages and force editors to use managed assets only instead. If assets on pages are allowed, the overview showing the corresponding asset set is by default demoted to a sub menu item - the asset set of assets on pages must not appear as equal among the other asset sets. This, again, could be configurable.
Three ways to view assets
AdminCentral offers a maximum of three views on managed assets. A view selector allows to switch between them.
- Assets or renditions may be shown as a flat list.
- They may be shown in a thumbnail view.
- The folder structure view shows assets inside a hierarchy of folders, if it has been defined and the asset set actually supports this.
Each view offers an actions view listing the actions applicable to the currently selected item or items. Below the actions view in the sidebar on the right (left on LTR setups), a larger preview of the selected asset or rendition is shown by the preview view, which also shows additional details on the item. Data presented by the preview view must be carefully selected with the goal to support finding and identifying a specific asset or rendition from a large list of items and care must be taken not to provide any unrelated information.
Preview shows details
The preview viewin the sidebar on the right (on the left on LTR setups) offers a second tab showing all kinds of details on an asset or rendition including info on its format, resolution, color depth (and similar - this obviously depends largely on the asset type), but also additional details on its status and when and who it was last edited.
