Hello,

Today I was amazed to learn that Image Uploader is popular enough to cause open-source community to create applications which use Image Uploader. I have discovered an Image Uploader based addon for Drupal - very popular open-source CMS. It is called Aurigma Uploader for ImageField. It allows to upload files as attachments to the pages and stories posted on the website.  This addon was submitted to the Drupal website by Aaron Wolfe.

Although this addon is pretty raw (I had to modify the source code to get it working, and it still displayed some warnings), it was great to learn that such addon exists. I believe it will be improved and people will find it useful.

I had an idea about series of addons for various open-source CMSes, but unfortunately we had not enough resources to get involved into it deeply. I am glad to know that open-source community finds it interesting to do it.

By the way, if Aaron or any other person involved into this addon development need any assistance with it, we will be happy to help. Just let us know. 

Hello,

I have posted one more Aurigma Community project – Multiple Upload plug-in for WordPress. You could read about it in this post.

I think this plug-in is a good example of what we are (Aurigma team) moving to (one of our goals): we are making our products usage more simple that it is now. The first project was ASP.NET control when you could simply drag'n'drop it to the page, adjust its properties and ImageUploader insertion code created automatically. WordPress plug-in is the next step. You just copy its files to the plug-ins folder, activate it via administration panel and it starts working. What would be the next step? You could post your ideas about possible answer here.

Few days ago my colleague Fedor added a short blog post about ASP.NET wrapper control for our product Image Uploader. In fact this control starts the real implementation of our initiative we call Aurigma Forge. I would like to tell about it more detailed. Alex mentioned it earlier but I think it is a high time to give more information about it.

What is Aurigma Forge?

In short this is a series of open-source projects based on our products - Image Uploader and Graphics Mill. We publish these projects on our website and everyone can download them, use, modify, and of course share them with others. At the first step, we will develop them actively ourselves, but we highly encourage everyone to join us. 

How it works? 

It works very simple. For each product line we have a subforum on our forums called Community Projects. Everyone who want to submit a project just create a post with source code and some information about it (how to use it, etc). Other people who are interested to take part in this project just post replies and share with their modifications if necessary.

Currently there is the only one such subforum in Image Uploader block, but we plan to add Graphics Mill community project subforum in the near future.

Initially we planned to deploy source code repository like on sourceforge.net (yes, they inspired the initiative name :) ). But then we thought that it would complicate things. If projects become popular and there will be a lot of contributors, we will definitely make it available. But until then we decided to keep things simpler.

What kind of projects will be launched? 

You may wonder what kind of projects it can be. For now they are:

• Image Uploader related
  • ASP.NET wrapper control which radically simplifies Image Uploader usage for ASP.NET developers.
  • Plugins for different CMS systems like WordPress, DotNetNuke, Cyahoga, Joomla, etc. They will be more or less ready-to-use photo galleries. It may be interpreted as resurrection of Media Gallery product line with new contemporary vision.
• Graphics Mill related
  • Editor for photo gifts (mugs, t-shorts, etc)
  • Real-life app for business card editing (based on Advanced PSD addon)
  • Most of current demo apps - we hope for your feedback so that we could understand what to improve there.

If you have some ideas on other projects do not hesitate to post a comment! Any other feedback is welcome as well.

We have a huge feedback from our clients: we have a lot of emails, forum messages, calls etc. every day. And you know, sometimes we get brilliant ideas about how to use our products for different tasks. Also we have a lot of questions about how to do this and how to do that. Some ideas are interesting for a lot of our clients. Thus we will make Aurigma Forge, the resource where such ideas implementation articles will be stored.

At the nearest time I'm going to post some articles there. I will describe the new samples of Image Uploader usage. Other members of our team will write their articles too. And we are waiting for such posts from you. I'm sure there are more tasks our products could help with so let's put these ideas together.

At the nearest time the new resource will be created. It will be named Aurigma Forge. We know that our clients have a lot of experience in using such popular products as Image Uploader and Graphics Mill for .NET so Aurigma Forge will be the best place to show your skills to the others. We are going to post our ideas here too.