A few of you might have noticed that during the month of February pMachine.com is accepting submissions for its $15,000 Website Shootout.  There is a ton of prizes and money just waiting to be won by you, so if you think your site is pretty, just darn neat, or otherworldly then it would be an excellent idea to enter it.  The contest is open to anyone running an ExpressionEngine based site (that includes you EE Core users), so that should be just about everyone, right?  The judges are various celebrities from around the net (I know at least two of them at least), and they are far snazzier dressers than me so I guess they deserve to be.  Good luck one and all.

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I wanted to ask this, think this is the right place.

Your website will be judged on innovation, excellence of design, usability, and content.

1. Is the contest limited to English sites only, if not how are you going to judge non English content?

2. If my site wins both the first prize and 2nd prize, can I pass the second prize to some one else, someone who really needs cheer?  (Ah, my sense of humanity again) 

Thanks for the getting the ball rolling on the file upload extension. I haven’t been part of recent discussions, but I made a feature request in the past for this type of functionality to be included in EE on a custom field level. It would be nice to be able to choose a custom field that was called “file upload” and have a regular text field displayed with a “file upload” button next to it. The button would then launch the upload process exactly how you have demonstrated. It would be cool if they were tied together as well, so if a new file was uploaded using the button, it would overwrite the first image that was placed there (with maybe even the option of deleting the first image from the image directory).

Is this even possible with an extension?

Thanks again for this, nice work.

Jesse BC

Those are questions for Leslie who is in charge of the contest, so I would send him a nice little email requesting clarification.

I think it would be possible.  Extensions can overwrite (or expand in this case) the custom weblog field, so it should be possible to add an upload button alongside the field or totally replace it.  You would actually have three choices.  You could either do a popup window like how it currently exists, make it really slick with AJAX doing the upload behind the scenes, or you could simply choose the file and then have the processing done when the entry was submitted.  I think the first option would probably be the easiest but the third is not too bad either.

The 1st and 2nd options sound best to me. With the 3rd option you would see a major delay if you had like 10 mp3’s being uploaded on the same page. It would also be cool if when you were setting up the custom field, you could also tell it what folder to stick the image / file into.

I think this type of image management would really help when making e-commerce type sites, where there is a standard image attached to every post. I could see it used for stuff like real estate listings, and auto listings as well.

I’ve just tried out the Simple Uploader. Great little thing, but I have a couple of questions:

1. Would it be possible to set it up so that it’s only enabled for the blog(s) of your choice?
2. Would it be possible to have a auto create thumbnail setting be default, kind of like the moblog has?

The reason I ask is because I’d like to have the Simple Uploader for one specific blog, where novice users will be posting entires. At the same time I’d like to have the advanced upload possibilities for the other blogs.

1.  It would require new code but it could be done.
2.  Same as before, it could be done.

Sounds like you need a slightly more customized extension for your purposes.