Hi Lee,

Here are a couple of points of mine regarding your suggestions (you've
already heard Mugur's. I started writing this the other day, so let me
finish it:

> First off, it would be nice to be able to restrict users to a
> specific article type(s). Example, if I have a photographer, he
> doesn't need access to the article type "Article", he needs access
> just to an article type "Image", listing image, photographer,
> location, and caption.

We already have a ticket asking for association of article types to
sections and publications (http://trac.campware.org/campsite/ticket/298).
Perhaps it would be a good idea to extend it to particular users/user
types. As Mugur said, and as the ticket number testifies, this has not been
our priority, but it'd be great if you contributed it.

>
> Secondly, it would be ideal to have a "binding" field type. Example:
> My photographer enters his info in the article type called "Image".
> Then a journalist goes and enters a news article, and one field of
> the type "binding" would be for image. They would select an image
> which was entered through the article type "Image" and once the
> image is selected, it would pull the photographer, location and
> caption data from the image and incorporate it with the article. Did
> that make sense or am I rambling?

Maybe I am not grasping the full concept properly, but in terms of your
example, I don't see why you would need a special article type for this
purpose. If you wanted to limit photographers to adding photos only, then
you can already do that by using the user rights, limiting your
photographer to a few rights beyond "User may add images". In terms of
metadata (Add new image screen), we currently have only:
- Description:
- Photographer:
- Place:
- Date:

Of course, we should rework the photo metadata and metadata in general
(e.g. automatic import of EXIF, IPTC), but even now you could use the
Description field for the caption. The Photographer field is automatically
populated with the name of the logged in user, but is editable. All of
these can be printed by the template engine.

What occurs to me is that we could further connect the Photographer to the
Authors table (and thereby open it to all Author list features), but that's
another discussion.

(BTW, I don't know if you are aware that you can also make the user rights
work for you in the opposite way, e.g. you may have journalists who are
esthetically challenged, so you could take away their right to attach
images to articles, thereby allowing your photographers or a photo editor
to assign which photos go with what article, leaving the journalist to
manipulate only the pre-assigned, i.e. "attached" images)

All the best,

Sava