I am a programmer who works for a TV, my main job is developing/improving a newsroom computer system (NRCS). It is a PHP/MySQL application.
Let’s say we have a news story and we need to associate some video, audio or photo with it.
This is how it currently works:
User opens the “MODIFY” page for this certain news story. It is a simple form with textboxes, where user can change caption, intro, etc. Now, chosing video, audio or photo is also done by simple textboxes, (which is not really convinient). When a user wants to associate e.g. a video file with this news story, the user first opens a list of video files (which is a seperate webpage), he finds the desired video and writes down its ID (on a paper). Then he browses back to news story “MODIFY” webpage and types that ID into a textbox for video. That’s how the news story gets associated with this particular video file. The same practice is for the audio files and photos…
I would like to improve this, to skip this part with writing down the video ID and then going to another page and typing it into a textbox, etc… Perhaps, instead of the textbox we can put a link which will open a video list in window or frame within that same webpage, then user can find and choose a video from the list by clicking on it, and then the window/frame closes and returns the information to the parent webpage, etc…
Please give me an advice about which of your excellent tools would be the most appropriate for this.
Vladimir