Thread

I have two weblogs: press and news.

In the press weblog there’s a custom field named “gallery” which is FF Matrix field+nGen File Field type. I use it to create a mini gallery for interviews I post on my website.

In the news weblog I post news about new interviews in press weblog (don’t ask me why I need this fuss 😊 What I want in this weblog’s entries is a small preview of the gallery of a spoken interview (just one of the images from the gallery) to show near the news title and summary.

Right now I’m using a custom field in press weblog of FF Matrix+ nGen File Field type to upload a preview (which actually is the same as one of the images in the gallery field) and then a custom relation field in News weblog which pulls this preview into ne news template.

But I feel this is a huge overload as I need to upload one of the files twice - one instance into the gallery and one into the preview field. I wonder is there any way to “mark” one of the gallery’s images while uploading (during creating entry in Publish tab) for using as “preview” so that I can pull this preview into _another_blog_ entry?

So I’ve finally come with 2 solutions for this. Everything that was needed is to RTFM! 😊

1. Always use the 1st pic from the gallery by incorporating limit=“1” parameter for the FF Matrix tag, e.x.:

{related_entries id="link_to_article"}
  {image_upload limit="1"}
    {exp:imgsizer:size src="{image}" width="100" height="100" alt="{alt_descr}"}
  {/image_upload}
{/related_entries}

This is easy but requires you to always upload the required_for_preview image first, and this maybe unappropriate sometimes when pics order is essential.

2. Choose one of the images by incorporating search: parameter of FF Matrix:
so I’ve created a new column in my FF Matrix field, named it “choose_for_preview”. When I compose an entry, I leave all the cells in choose_for_preview column blank except the one that is in a row of the image I want to use as a preview (in this sell I just type “yes”, without quotes of course).
Then in the template:

{related_entries id="link_to_article"}
  {image_upload search:choose_for_preview="yes"}
   {exp:imgsizer:size src="{image}" width="100" height="100" alt="{alt_descr}"}
  {/image_upload}
{/related_entries}

This one allows to upload all the images in whatever order you need and then simply choose the one which will be used as a preview in another weblog. Hurray!

So the lesson learned: RTFM, guys 😊