Digital Asset Management (DAM): Integration for Plone

Plone Support Customizing Plone
1

I'd like to know who in the community has integrated a DAM (basically a image-library) with Plone.

  • Which DAM-System?
  • For which version of Plone?
  • What is the level of integration?
2

There used to be an integration of Plone with a photography database but I forget the details :slight_smile:

That was then...what sort of image library are you thinking of and what would the requirements be for the integration?

3

I'm neither looking at a specific DAM system not do I have specific requirements. I'm only trying to find out what exists out there.

A requirement could be to be able to browse images and include them when editing in TinyMCE.

You could also simply get a publicly accessible URL generated by the DAM and use it in TinyMCE as a external image.

4

I used to use Canto (Cumulus) years ago, and I see that they have an add-on for Wordpress (which seem quite simple to port): Plugins categorized as dam | WordPress.org

That said: making a TinyMCE plugin that browses some url (where you have your DAM), returning the URL should be doable(?)

5

Sounds like a cool idea for GSoC maybe? Ability to browse other image repositories. A pluggable way of specifying those image repositories, and a way of selecting the repository you want to retrieve images from when inserting into TinyMCE.

6

I would like to pick up this thread again.

We are currently also investigating options for a DAM solutions, asset library or something similar in combination within Plone. Key requirements are: must be API driven, authentication somehow integrateable with Plone.

Any fresh ideas?

7

We're using https://www.resourcespace.com which is pretty popular in the nonprofit space, it has an API (which we are not using, so can't give full info on that). It authenticates against LDAP and family.

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8

Canto (Cumulus) has AD/LDAP Integration and a REST-API to serve the Assets.

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9

For my personal understanding and the state of DAM's.... What is the purpose of the integration in most cases when connection to a DAM?

  • Browsing selecting and then copying the media into Plone for further use and consumption?

  • Or are there also DAM's that host the media to the outside world and Plone only needs to store a unique identifier / link to the hosting URL?

10

We did the evaluation for 3 customers with similar requirements (but nothing was implemented yet): Use assets from a DAM, but not solely in Plone. So the assets could be used on different channels/platforms from within the organization. One big player we looked at is Cloudinary. For a self hosted solution there is Thumbor available.

Editors should be able to browse and insert assets from the DAM. Some solutions provide JS clients which can be integrated into Plone. But the easiest way to do this is to have regular images with links to the DAM instead of an attached blob. So you first add an image, select the DAM resource, and then use the image in TinyMCE or whatever.

One benefit is that you can serve the asset from a dedicated CDN and not Plone. So we would have stored the links to the assets. This also allows on-the-fly optimization for images (webp or avif if the browser supports it).

11

I did some work with @flipmcf to create a Plone add-on that works with Resource Space. Their API isn't the greatest, but I was able to work with it.

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12

I need to work more on this. The "get image from DAM" side of the story is working great, but the "Upload image to DAM" isn't.

Chrissy did some excellent work, tho. We have a metapackage "resourcemanager" that's supposed to be DAM agnostic. Then the package "resourcemanager.resourcespace" that integrates specifically with your DAM (resourcespace, in this example)

We connected Associated Press and Reuters image libraries also - through the metapackage.

So, although it was meant for DAMs, it's ready to be extended to implement something for imgur or something.